Background: Mechanical ventilation during patient transport frequently utilizes compact portable pneumatic ventilators that have limited ventilator-settings options. New advanced transport ventilators should yield quality improvements, but their user-friendliness needs to be tested.
Objective: To evaluate the ventilator-user interface of 2 new transport ventilators.
Methods: This was a 2-center descriptive study in which the ventilator-user interfaces of the Oxylog 3000 and Elisée 250 were compared by 20 French senior emergency physicians who were initially unfamiliar with these ventilators. Each physician carried out 15 tasks with each ventilator and then assigned each ventilator a satisfaction score.
Results: With the Elisée 250 the task success rate was significantly higher (85.6% vs 66.6% with the Oxylog 3000, p < 0.0001), and the total number of errors was lower (46 vs 113). The main errors were related to inspiratory flow settings with the Oxylog 3000 (31 errors), inspiratory-expiratory ratio settings with the Elisée 250 (11 errors), ventilation mode choice with the Oxylog 3000 (17 errors), trigger sensitivity setting with the Elisée 250 (16 errors) and the Oxylog 3000 (11 errors), and alarm range setting with the Oxylog 3000 (10 errors). The mean satisfaction score was significantly better with the Elisée 250 (81% +/- 7, range 64-92%) than with the Oxylog 3000 (66% +/- 10, range 49-87%) (p < 0.0001).
Conclusions: The Elisée 250 ventilator-user interface was easier to use than that of the Oxylog 3000. The applicability of these results to other types of users will require further studies, but the types of errors found in our study might help future users.