October 19th, Bangalore: Global humanitarian leader and peacemaker, Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar inaugurated India’s first IoT-enabled mobile medical oxygen plant with a cylinder filling station at The Art of Living International Center, as part of the launch of national Medical Oxygen Grid project. The basic premise for the project is to create a robust mechanism for the captive source of oxygen generation, cylinder filling stations, and a functional distribution network to ensure last-mile delivery and availability of Medical Oxygen. As part of the project, first-ever IoT-Enabled Containerized Oxygen Generator Truck was flagged off.
“This initiative will empower rural and urban India with easily accessible and affordable medical-grade oxygen,” Gurudev said at the launch, “This is a much-needed solution that has been developed with many scientists on board. This low-cost solution can aid the supply of medical oxygen in rural and urban areas. Art of Living will fully support their introduction and distribution in villages."
Given that, in India majority of the population continues to be concentrated in villages and many of the villages are still not well connected with bigger towns and cities, the rural-India-centric design will make the last-mile delivery and availability of medical oxygen in rural areas possible and viable.
“Let us make it clear that this concept was not envisioned due to the covid-19 pandemic, though this phase saw a sudden spurt of demand for medical oxygen throughout our nation,” said Mr.Mallikarjun Dandinawar, founder, OxyAid, “Creating of this National Medical Oxygen Grid is an exercise of laying a strong foundation of Rural Healthcare Infrastructure with the basic premise of arresting the migration of patients from villages to cities. This will ensure accountability, skilling and empowerment of our government hospitals by leveraging IOT technology.”
The project's objective is to address the five main challenges: availability, accessibility, affordability, accountability and infrastructure. This is how the challenges will be addressed:
1) Availability: At the doorstep!!
This will solve the problem of poor since the oxygen plants are usually located far in Industrial Zones and the dealers are only in cities and not in Talukas, who work on fixed hours.
2) Accessibility: Will make oxygen cylinder Banks available in Taluka and Community health Centres and leverage IOT technology for Inventory control.
3) Affordability: We need to spend Rs 60 per hour on a patient in Government hospitals and 3-5 times more in a private Hospital. The project will work on a cross-subsidising mechanism to ensure free Oxygen to the Needy. *Cost of oxygen filling in the inaugural project has been brought down to Rs. 80 per cylinder from Rs.200 currently.*
4) Accountability: Arresting pilferage of oxygen in Government Hospitals. Deploying IoT in Oxygen Generation Plants will ensure correct volume, purity, pressure, and duration of the operation.
5) Infrastructure:
1.Converting fire brigade stations also into oxygen cylinder filling stations by leveraging the existing infrastructure (highly accessible within city limits).
2.Training the existing manpower, thus ensuring doorstep delivery and services of 24 x 7 x 365 days of Oxygen to Government and Private Hospitals and Patients at Home.
3.This Plan is envisioned with a rural- India-centric design ensuring last-mile delivery in an extensive and populous country.
4.This is a national mission that ensures the first fundamental right enshrined in our constitution: “Right to Life”.
