DIY LoCo-Baby: a ultra–low-cost infant CPR manikin for universal training access

Dear editor,

To train adults and children on a large scale and increase the number of people who can save lives, we must consider the circumstances of remote areas and low-resource settings. In such places, affordable manikins (from a high-income world perspective) are too expensive and unattainable. To address this significant barrier to training and learning basic life support, do-it-yourself (DIY) cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) manikins have been designed and proposed.¹ This training tool has been recognized in the 2025 European Resuscitation Council guidelines² and can have a positive impact not only in low-resource settings but also in any school worldwide that wishes to develop an educational project follow Kids Save Lives.

Our research group, after developing and testing the LocoMan DIY child manikin,³ has designed an even simpler DIY infant model that we consider could be very useful for training at schools or home with family and friends, and in both low and high-income countries, as a school task in physical education, arts, or sciences.

To our knowledge, this is the first described DIY infant model that has been calibrated with a commercial infant manikin to allow for realistic chest compressions and ventilations following infant resuscitation guidelines.⁴ Our previous results with a pilot group of infant teacher students (n = 21), who were trained in CPR with the LoCo-Baby and later evaluated with the Resusci Baby by Laerdal® (Stavanger, Norway), achieved a CPR quality of 64%, 69% in ventilations, and 60% in chest compressions. These results are at the threshold of the commonly accepted CPR quality standard for evaluation with manikin simulations.⁵

However, the greatest value lies in the fact that these results were achieved after a brief 10-minute training with materials costing no more than 50 euro cents, which can be self-assembled in less than 5 min. This low-cost solution should enhance accessibility to CPR training resources in settings where commercial manikins are unavailable or unaffordable, contribute to reducing CPR education costs, and eventually lead to universal access to lifesaving skills.

Low-cost materials for DIY LoCo-Baby:

• –One square plastic bottle (≈0.5 L)
• –One medium-sized plastic balloon (5–8 cm in diameter when deflated)
• –One plastic tube, 1 cm in diameter and about 10 cm long
• –One or two soft rectangular sponges (approx. 10 × 4 × 3 cm)
• –Adhesive tape and a cutter or utility knife/scissors

DIY LoCo-Baby: step by step (see attached video and Fig. 1)

• 1.Cut the bottle to approximately two-thirds of its original height.
• 2.Chest rise mechanism, part 1: Make two vertical cuts about 5 cm long and spaced roughly 3 cm apart to allow visible chest re-expansion during ventilation.
• 3.Chest rise mechanism, part 2: Make a cut in the top of the bottle to insert a 1 cm diameter tube. Insert the tube through this opening and attach it to a balloon, which will simulate the lungs during ventilation.
• 4.Chest rise mechanism, part 3: Place a sponge as a spacer between the bottle walls and the balloon.
• 5.Draw a fun face on cardboard and attach it to the bottle with glue or tape.
• 6.Check the function and practice/teach CPR anywhere.

Fig. 1.

DIY LoCo-Baby step by step.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Appendix A. Supplementary material

The following are the Supplementary material to this article: