The Oxygen Challenge
Project: R-O2 has identified three key gaps that our solution must bridge: oxygen, energy and access.
Firstly, COVID-19 has highlighted starkly the global shortage of medical oxygen and revealed the sobering reality that even the best health care systems around the world are vulnerable to being easily overwhelmed. In June, the WHO called for 170,000 new oxygen concentrators to be produced in 2020. The shortage of oxygen however is neither a new nor temporary phenomenon, with well below half of hospitals in sub-Saharan Africa having access to an oxygen supply of any kind. Furthermore, child pneumonia (for which oxygen therapy is a vital treatment) claims the lives of over 800,000 children under the age of five annually (WHO, 2017).
The shortage of oxygen is compounded by the high cost and unreliability of existing solutions with extreme heat, humidity and dust reducing their life span. These units are typically difficult to repair and replacement parts (especially electronic components) are expensive or impossible to source.
Secondly, access to oxygen is intrinsically connected to access to energy. Existing pressure swing adsorption (PSA) oxygen concentrators rely on AC power supply and backup generators. However according to Tracking SDG7, 789 million people have no access to any kind of energy source and of the hospitals globally who do have grid power, 72% report that it remains unreliable. It is estimated that in sub-Saharan Africa only 43.4% of hospitals have continuous access to both oxygen and electricity. However, if results are adjusted to assume that those who did not respond to the survey had no oxygen or electricity, the figure falls to a shocking 3.9% (Mangipudi, 2020).
Both these gaps highlight what is so often the case: that those who have the greatest need are also those who have the least access to solutions, the third gap that we must bridge through partnership with health ministries, NGOs, foundations and institutions with a shared vision to bring this solution to those who need it the most, securing sustainable access to Oxygen for all.
The global pandemic has awoken the world to the inequality of access to oxygen. But by working together, we can find a solution.
The R-O2 Concentrator
Lichen aims to bridge these gaps and has commenced development of an off-grid oxygen concentrator specifically for low resource settings that is far simpler and cost effective to manufacture, maintain and repair and that can be powered by renewables as well as grid power.
It's increased energy efficiency allows it to be powered by lower yield energy sources such as solar, wind and hydro whilst helping hospitals manage their power consumption and free up energy to be allocated for other vital purposes such as refrigerators and incubators. These innovations will allow us to offer a solution that aims not only to temporarily ‘plug a gap’ in global oxygen supply, but to help health providers worldwide build long-term resilience with sustainability at its core.
However, in order to guarantee sustainable access to oxygen and long term resilience the related challenge of energy access must be considered. The scale of this challenge demands cooperation and collaboration with specialists, innovators, NGOs, governments and businesses around the world in order to find and implement a solution. To this end, the Resilient Oxygen Project is part of the Oxygen CoLab, a group brought together by the Foreign & Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO) of the United Kingdom in order to establish a concerted response to the global oxygen crisis.