The Ox Project

Invention Coach:

Public Inventor(s):

Darío Hereñú

Main Link:

Motivation:

The Need for a Rugged Oxygen Concentrator

Medical grade oxygen is an essential component of respiratory therapy. Typically this is provided by industrial scale cryogenic oxygen concentrators. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the existing need for medical oxygen in field hospital settings around the world. Many communities have a variety of challenges that need to be overcome to deliver oxygen to their patients.

In some cases, human resources are limited both medically and technologically. Medical staff communicate in a variety of local languages and may have little experience. Staff to patient ratios are much higher than is acceptable in a fully equipped hospital. Technical support staff face challenges such as lack of training and basic maintenance equipment.

Field hospital settings may be urban or rural. Environments such as high temperatures, high humidity and fine dust particles also create engineering challenges. Infrastructure and logistics create additional barriers to oxygen.

The Ox: An Open-Source Solution

This has raised the need to design a device that can be manufactured locally, along with sufficient documentation to present to local regulatory authorities. Medical device standards must be met and this project aims to meet them. Ultimately, the central mission of the Ox project is to fulfill this need and create a scalable, open-source oxygen concentrator for medical therapies in rugged environments.

Collaborators

Many thanks to Project Apollo, Helpful Engineering and EnAccess OpenO2 for their ongoing collaboration.

Story:

Collaboration with NASA and the COG

This project is a control system built for NASA to support a Ceramic Oxygen Generation technology they developed. It was a fork of the VentOS project of Helpful Engineering led by Ben Coombs, Dr. Erich Schulz, and Robert L. Read.

The Ox’s code represents a platform of simple microcontroller control of related machines, which is relevant for future projects. This project includes PlatformIO configuration, a state machine (finite automata), superloop architecture, and a hardware abstraction layer.

This particular project is meant to improve life support technology in space through further development of NASA’s Ceramic Oxygen Generator (COG). However, it may also greatly improve global health and oxygen generation in rugged environments.

The Ox: Control System Code

The team intended to build a native simulation using mock hardware components. They used the RibbonFish proof-of-concept.

As this developed, it used a specific Due Hardware Configuration. Please see the documentation for details to build your own.

The Command System

The NASA-COG system needs to allow the user to enter commands. The most obvious of these is “turn off”. This is not a simple problem to overcome, as the system should avoid thermal shocks.

Public Invention teams have previously used simple JSON objects to represent commands. The Ox team proposes to use the same idea here, although the command will be custom to the NASA-COG.