In the depths of the COVID pandemic, when intensive care units were packed with patients struggling to breathe, an idea came to Dr. Umar Sofi.
Sofi is a pulmonologist at Carilion Clinic. “The respiratory therapists, they were really stressed, because there were hundreds of patients in the hospital,” Sofi said. “I would come in the morning and I would see this patient, either on too much oxygen, or too little oxygen.”
Sofi would adjust the oxygen flow manually, a process which might take five or six minutes.
“I would say, ‘there needs to be a process by which a machine can do the job.’ So that’s where the thought came from.”
The thought in Sofi’s head is now tangible, in the form of a small box sporting a bouquet of multicolored wires. This is the rough prototype of Sofi’s invention: FRNDS, Flow Regulated Nasal Delivery System.
It doesn’t take a…
