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New Delhi: Indian researchers have designed a robust, mobile group oxygen concentrator that can be used in rural settings and also be rapidly deployed in emergencies in any location.
The second wave of COVID-19 led to an acute shortage of medical oxygen. While the crisis in the bigger cities was more about rapidly responding by overcoming supply chain limitations, in smaller cities and villages, the crisis exposed the chronic lack of medical oxygen infrastructure in the country.
Overcoming the crisis required two types of solutions — 5 to 10 lpm personalized O
2 concentrators for home uses and 500 lpm PSA plants for large hospitals. While the 500 Ipm plants for hospitals were robust, they lacked the portability required for deployment on resource-poor settings, while personal concentrators were too fragile to be used on a sustained basis in a hospital setting. This created a need for a robust technology with necessary portability.