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Motivation:
Oxygen for Rural Communities
This project aims to provide oxygen to hospitals and surgical facilities in rugged and low-income areas at the same quality as highly resourced medical centers and NASA.
Simplicity and Low Expense
The ceramic ion transport device is optimized for low-income areas due to the simplicity of its design, which includes no moving parts except for a small fan. Additionally, it pulls oxygen directly from the air, thus avoiding the difficulty and expense of oxygen transport and maintenance. Finally, the digital control system, which Public Invention designed, will support the technology during brownouts and blackouts. This avoids loss of necessary resources during catastrophic events, which are common in low- and middle-income countries.
Story:
Development through Collaboration
Public Invention and KidsOR members Courtney Ludick and Dave Tipping have teamed up with NASA to experiment with a new technology produced by American Oxygen. The NASA/AmOx/Public Invention system has been installed at the KidsOR headquarters in Dundee, Scotland.
Oxygen Quality: Ceramic Ion Transport and Data Acquisition Sensors
This simple technology uses ceramic ion transport to pull oxygen directly out of the air, and it is expected to find use in hospitals in remote and rural locations. Public Invention also designed a data acquisition system that constantly logs purity for three different kinds of sensors, and measures flow against 100 psi pressure. These measurements are sufficient to someday allow a KidsOR installation to bottle oxygen directly.
Learn more about the development of this project in this article.
Related Open-Source Projects
If interested in learning more about other projects, check the following pages for updates and volunteer opportunities:
Status:
Skills Needed
As per the NASA-MCOG project which this generator has developed from, the KidsOR team is looking for new team members with the following backgrounds:
- Microcontroller programming
- System architecture design (e.g., state machines and hardware abstraction)
- Familiarity with platforms like PlatformIO.
- Embedded firmware development
- Sensor integration
- Hardware control
- C++ programming
- Serial communication protocols (e.g., JSON)
- Basic knowledge of life support systems and oxygen generation technology.
If interested in joining the project, please reach out to Robert L. Read, Volunteer Coordinator Miriam Castillo, or Volunteer Now.
Quarterly Goals
KidsOR is currently running a six month experiment to check that the system can work uninterrupted for an extended period of time without losing the oxygen’s purity, flow, or pressure.
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