Safety matters every time, what about even the matters of life or health? There have been performed interviews with clinical experts to determine the key safety requirements, which you can find i.e. here: https://emergency-vent.mit.edu/controls/list-of-alarms/. But there might be more statuses of emergency, coming also from other medical fields, electrical engineering, etc.
Challenge
The challenge combines mostly electronic and coding skills, but medical and mechanical design ones might be useful too. Your challenge will be to:
Understand the risks for the mechanical ventilation defined by the clinical experts and, eventually, define the new risks based on your team unique knowledge;
Implement the needed sensors, parts of human-machine interface and make ready the HW part of the prototype to tackle the challenge;
Define the workflow for every identified risk and implement it to the firmware.
Impact
We foresee the presentation of (as advance as possible) prototype, with implemented alarms or (even mitigation strategies) for identified risks.