Control Applications in Artificial Ventilation (Invited Paper)

The history of artificial ventilation is closely related to the origin of anesthesia. After the introduction of ether for use as a anesthetic drug in Boston, USA, in 1846, the need for artificial ventilation soon became evident. Soon after, the first medical devices allowing proper dosing of the agents, guaranteeing pressure control of the carrier gases and offering bags for manual mask ventilation became available. However, in those days surgical procedures were rather short, with one of the limiting factors beeing manual ventilation. In the fifties of the last century, the first devices for pneumatically operated bellows were introduced, which improved the possible duration of surgical procedures significantly. The dawn of long-term artificial ventilation and thus the beginning of modern intensive care can also be dated to this time period (1). Drivers of these developments were the huge polio epidemics where a large patient population was in need of temporary artifical ventilation within a short period of time. Large numbers of so called iron lungs were rapidly produced to save the lives of infected persons, see Fig. 1.