What is it about?
Tracheostomy patients face many adversities including loss of phonation and essential airway functions including air filtering, warming, and humidification. Heat and moisture exchangers (HMEs) facilitate humidification and filtering of inspired air. This paper is about a new HME, the Shikani HME™ with unique airflow dynamics and which helps restoring these lost functions.
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Why is it important?
The Shikani HME™ has a turbulent flow and provides heat and moisture exchange with similar or greater efficacy than other widely used laminar airflow traditional HMEs on the market, but with significantly lower resistance. The Shikani HME™ also allows the innovative advantage of in-line use with the Shikani Speaking Valve™, hence allowing concurrent humidification and phonation during application, without having to manipulate either device.
Perspectives
Writing this article was a great pleasure as it has co-authors with whom I have had long standing collaborations. We all felt that both Academia and Industry have focus on humidification and filtering for for the laryngectomy patients but that tracheotomy patients enough attention, which is the reason on developing this novel tracheotomy HME. The clinical implications of the Shikani HME™ are important as it means that tracheostomy patients are able to phonate, filter, warm and humidify air without added work of breathing or discomfort, a true paradigm shift in the care of both adults and pediatric tracheotomy patients.
Alan Shikani
MedStar Health
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Shikani HME: A New Tracheostomy Heat and Moisture Exchanger, Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, September 2020, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA),
DOI: 10.1044/2020_jslhr-19-00107.
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