Introduction
RO2 is building resilient oxygen ecosystems so that every patient and every hospital can rely on safe, continuous access to medical oxygen. Born from collaboration between practitioners working across the oxygen value chain, the venture focuses on the real-world barriers that keep concentrators idle – harsh environments, power instability, scarce spare parts, and limited maintenance capacity – and turns them into practical opportunities for improvement.
Mission
RO2’s mission is to strengthen today’s oxygen systems while laying the groundwork for tomorrow’s technologies. In practice, that means equipping biomedical engineers and health administrators with a toolkit that includes retrofittable remote monitoring for concentrator uptime, approaches to extend device life (such as zeolite regeneration), and power and dust-protection solutions, developed and tested with in-country partners and Ministries of Health. Early partnerships in Ethiopia and Fiji are shaping the first deployments, with co-created requirements, a shared dashboard for maintenance planning, and evidence-building pilots designed to support sustainable, system-level adoption.
Achievements
To date, RO2 has consolidated two UK initiatives into a single mission-driven company, defined the monitoring architecture for a modular, retrofittable unit, and progressed toward pilots with Trust Biomedical in Ethiopia and Cure Kids alongside Fiji’s Ministry of Health and Medical Services. Fieldwork supported by CGE’s Co-create Travel Award mapped the oxygen ecosystem in Fiji, refined the feature set for remote monitoring (including usage visibility and maintenance tracking), and established high-value relationships that de-risk in-country trials and future scale. These milestones place RO2 on a credible path to improve concentrator uptime, reduce avoidable downtime, and provide governments and partners with the data needed to plan and invest for resilient oxygen access.
SDGs 3,9,11,17
