Off-grid Oxygen: affordable generation & storage of oxygen for off-grid healthcare & humanitarian disaster response

Oxygen is classified as an essential medicine by WHO and oxygen therapy described as "highly effective" at reducing global mortality for various medical conditions. The importance of oxygen therapy has become mainstream news during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the World Health Organisation, "good-quality oxygen concentrators can provide a sustainable and reliable source of oxygen to multiple patients. Oxygen concentrators operate by drawing air from the environment to deliver continuous, clean and concentrated oxygen. They may run for up to five years or more, with minimal service and maintenance."

Yet the availability of electricity, essential for powering oxygen concentrators/plants, compressing oxygen into canisters or piping it throughout a hospital, is an "important, but often overlooked, building block of health service delivery" \[poweringhc.org\]. Indeed, when only 44% of Sub-Saharan Africa's population have access to electricity, dropping to 22% in rural areas \[TrackingSDG7.esmap.org\] it is unsurprising that estimates indicate only 28% of health facilities in the region have "reliable electricity" access \[poweringhc.org\]. Globally estimates suggest "tens of thousands of health centers across low- and middle-income countries lack electricity" whilst similar numbers of hospitals "suffer from frequent and debilitating blackouts" \[poweringhc.org\]. Lack of electricity access constrains healthcare provision, most topically in the context of COVID-19, exacerbating difficulties in both generating and managing oxygen supply in response to sudden surges in demand for oxygen therapy.

Drawing on our expertise in the Sub-Saharan African off-grid energy access sector, we have identified an opportunity to innovatively enhance the energy efficiency of oxygen production as well as enabling this process to be powered by renewable energy. Our proposed off-grid oxygen concentrator will be custom designed to be affordable and easy to manufacture, maintain and repair within low-resource settings including disaster and emergency response. The intended oxygen output is set to fill a gap in the market, sitting between a portable pressure-swing-adsorption (PSA) oxygen concentrator (5-10L/min) and a (PSA) oxygen plant that supplies high pressure oxygen through a piped network across a healthcare facility or for compression into canisters to be consumed elsewhere. For example, each severely ill patient with COVID-19 would require 10L/min of oxygen therapy whilst a critically ill patient requires 30L/min (WHO Guidance for COVID-19 Treatment Centres). Hence our proposed solution seeks to design an off-grid oxygen concentrator that can meet the requirements of such treatment for more than one patient at a time.

During the first six months we have constructed a lab prototype of our Resilient Oxygen (R-O2) concentrator which proves the concept and commenced optimisation to increase energy efficiency. Our market research and partnership development identified demand for off-grid oxygen solutions amongst governments, health ministries and NGOs. EFI funding will increase speed to market by enabling us to: turn the lab prototype into a pre-production unit designed for manufacture and construct test units for field testing and CE Mark certification.