Design and implementation of a userfriendly oxygen concentrator

Long-term oxygen therapy is one of the methods increasing the duration of survival in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, with the oxygen concentrators being the most appropriate and economical choice for this treatment. Studies so far conducted show that a significant amount of oxygen concentrators in Turkey are wrongly used by patients, technical services are inadequate, no periodical maintenance is being done for devices requiring regular maintenance and control, and some devices do not yield the expected oxygen purity in long-term use. These problems in the oxygen concentrators are the most important factors causing delays in the treatment process because the patients are unable to receive oxygen at sufficient purity levels during the scheduled period. Therefore, it has become a necessity that oxygen concentrators are rearranged as devices addressing medical requirements and minimizing patient/device-based problems in parallel with the developments in the field of medical electronics. In this study, a userfriendly oxygen concentrator system is designed for patients receiving oxygen therapy and a prototype of this device is realized. In designed system the patient is informed visual and auditory, about the materials need change over time in device, the rate of oxygen purity in utilization time, pressure information, the high temperature in device, high pressure, low pressure, the fault of inadequate purity of oxygen rate and the utilization time of device. The most important feature of the system is the registration of the patient?s device usage information to the sd cards, an interface software that is developed in C# programming language, reading this registrations and taking a printout whenever wanted. The treatment process can be followed easily by the physicians without the necessity of the patient declaration, with the help of this printouts and the advantages of the packaged software that is written. So the setbacks originated from the functional problems of the device are prevented. The measurement results of the device show that it can provide an oxygen at the purity of 96.3% to 93,5 for flow velocities of 1 to 4 l/min, which is a sufficient rate for the treatment.