Powerless Oxygen Supply Machines Developed by University of Melbourne

When working in underdeveloped countries, health practitioners regularly come up against the simple problem of electricity shortages in order to deliver life-saving oxygen to sick children suffering from pneumonia.
Cited as the number one killer of children under five-years-old worldwide, pneumonia causes 1.5 million child deaths a year. Without a steady flow of purified oxygen the lungs of a child suffering from severe pneumonia will struggle to cope and the condition often becomes fatal - even the child suffering is on antibiotics.
But a team of University of Melbourne physicists and doctors have developed oxygen-supply machines that stores oxygen at low-pressure to ensure steady supply when the electricity fails. The project was developed through a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Grand Challenges Explorations Grants (which is specifically targeted for the prototyping of new technology. The machine, known as LPOS, It has potential to reduce child pneumonia mortality rates in developing country health facilities by 30 per cent. The team will test it in medical clinics in Uganda in August.
University of Melbourne Faculty of Science physicist Associate Professor Roger Rassool, who is leading the project, said the biggest problem with treating young pneumonia patients in developing countries is electricity shortages.
“The air we breathe is 78 per cent nitrogen and 21 per cent oxygen. This machine removes the nitrogen from the air and increases the concentration of oxygen to 90 per cent.”
The problem is, he says, when the electricity fails, as it often does in Sub-Saharan Africa, East Timor and Papua New Guinea, the flow of oxygen stops.
“We have developed a method of storing oxygen safely at a low pressure, which has the ability to maintain a flow of oxygen to a patient during a power outage,” he said.
“We thought, why don’t we capture the spare oxygen that’s being made when the power is on and keep it in a low pressure storage system to tap in to when the power goes off? Now we have funding to build it and test how to store enough oxygen to get through a day without electricity.”
While the machine doesn’t look pretty, the aim is to make them as affordable as possible. And easy to use: doctors use machines that use electricity to filter the nitrogen from the air, which are effective provided the power doesn’t fail. That’s why finding a way to store oxygen when the power fails is crucial.
The store in the machine would be enough to keep a child alive in excess of eight hours, even during a complete blackout.
“We have a simple, yet profound key performance indicator and that is how many lives we save,” says Rassool.
This August, the team will travel to Uganda to test the technology in medical clinics in East Africa while recording data, understanding the local issues with power supply and establishing relationships on the ground.
The ultimate aim is to establish a startup in Melbourne with strategic partnerships between the University, industry and community, to form the manufacturing capability here in Australia.
Image: The University of Melbourne team developing the LPOS machines, from left to right, Dr David Peake and Dr Bryn Sobott from the Physics Department, A/Prof Jim Black from Medicine and A/Prof Roger Rassool, project leader.