Anesthesia Miracle: No Power, No Oxygen Tanks, No Problem

npr.org

16 points·danso··5 comments

The device looks interesting, and it's probably a good solution for place where the electricity grid is unreliable. But I don't like this sentence:

> The device sucks regular air from a room using a compressor and turns it into purified oxygen for a patient's lungs.

It's difficult to separate the oxygen from the nitrogen without a complex device. Do anyone have a link with more information? Is this a mistake in the press article?

It's note pure oxygen. It's 95%. They are using a fairly normal oxygen concentrator that uses zeolite to remove nitrogen.

Details on the machine are at the company's site, including a nice animation showing how the whole thing works: http://www.gradianhealth.org/universal-anaesthesia-machine/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth

That makes it 95.6% oxygen. Probably good enough for most purposes. And the bulk (96%) of the non-oxygen is argon, which is inert.

I totally miss this technology advance! The video in company site has a more information than I expected. For a text version: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_concentrator

This sounds like a great example of well meaning donors not really understanding the people they are trying to help.

It would also be exciting to see some of these re-configurations reducing costs in developed countries.

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