Intellectual Ventures Laboratory, Bellevue, Washington, United States of America.
Department of Pediatrics, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, California, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2019 Feb 6;14(2):e0211027. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0211027. eCollection 2019.
Access to therapeutic oxygen remains a challenge in the effort to reduce pneumonia mortality among children in low- and middle-income countries. The use of oxygen concentrators is common, but their effectiveness in delivering uninterrupted oxygen is gated by reliability of the power grid. Often cylinders are employed to provide continuous coverage, but these can present other logistical challenges. In this study, we examined the use of a novel, low-pressure oxygen storage system to capture excess oxygen from a concentrator to be delivered to patients during an outage. A prototype was built and tested in a non-clinical trial in Jinja, Uganda. The trial was carried out at Jinja Regional Referral Hospital over a 75-day period. The flow rate of the unit was adjusted once per week between 0.5 and 5 liters per minute. Over the trial period, 1284 power failure episodes with a mean duration of 3.1 minutes (range 0.08 to 1720 minutes) were recorded. The low-pressure system was able to deliver oxygen over 56% of the 4,295 power outage minutes and cover over 99% of power outage events over the course of the study. These results demonstrate the technical feasibility of a method to extend oxygen availability and provide a basis for clinical trials.
在努力降低中低收入国家儿童肺炎死亡率的过程中，获得治疗性氧气仍然是一个挑战。使用氧气浓缩器很常见，但由于电网的可靠性，它们在输送不间断氧气方面的效果受到限制。通常使用钢瓶来提供持续的覆盖，但这些钢瓶可能会带来其他后勤方面的挑战。在这项研究中，我们研究了使用新型低压氧气储存系统来从浓缩器中捕获多余的氧气，并在停电期间输送给患者。我们在乌干达 Jinja 进行了一项非临床试验，建造并测试了一个原型。该试验在 Jinja 地区转诊医院进行了 75 天。每周调整一次单元的流速，范围在 0.5 到 5 升/分钟之间。在试验期间，记录了 1284 次停电事件，平均持续时间为 3.1 分钟（范围为 0.08 至 1720 分钟）。低压系统能够在 4295 分钟的停电时间中输送氧气超过 56%，并在研究过程中覆盖超过 99%的停电事件。这些结果证明了一种延长氧气供应的方法的技术可行性，并为临床试验提供了基础。
