Sarah's Story: The Complexity of Organ Transportation
When Sarah, a registered organ donor, tragically dies in a car accident, her organs immediately become a lifeline for multiple people. The moment she passes away and her status as an organ donor is confirmed, a chain reaction is set in motion. What happens is a race against time, and it’s anything but straightforward. Sarah had registered to donate everything—her heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, pancreas, corneas etc—potentially saving up to ten lives. But her organs each have their unique viability windows with recipients waiting in different hospitals, and getting those organs to the right recipients in time is a logistical and medical challenge that unfolds like a high-stakes movie scene.
First, hospitals must quickly identify potential recipients from a massive national database, considering factors like blood type, tissue compatibility, size, geographic location, and the urgency of each patient’s condition. Organisations, like NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT), step in to manage the process. They oversee the national organ donation system, helping to match available organs to the right patients. When matches are determined, hospitals in different parts of the country are alerted. Sarah’s heart might need to go to someone in London, while her liver is matched to a patient in Manchester, and her kidneys to a pair of recipients in Glasgow and Bristol. Each hospital scrambles to get their patient ready, calling them to drop everything and make themselves available for surgery.
In the meantime, there is also a rush to coordinate the delivery of Sarah’s organs and the transport is just as complex. These organs are simply most often placed in cooler boxes with ice and loaded into ambulances, sometimes even the cars of surgeons or staff, each one racing against traffic, weather, and time. Sometimes, third-party organisations specialising in medical logistics, work behind the scenes to ensure that organs move between cities and regions. Each organ has its own route, timing, and transport method—Sarah’s heart might be flown across the country in a helicopter or cargo plane, while her kidneys are driven to a nearby hospital, with no existing tools to track or manage the dangerous journeys these organs make in real-time.
As the clock ticks, the organs are slowly losing their viability. Hearts can only survive for about 4-6 hours, lungs up to 8 hours, and kidneys up to 36 hours. Every minute lost in transport or coordination reduces the chances of success. Every delay—whether it’s traffic, bad weather, or logistical mismanagement—puts the success of the transplants at risk. The whole process is manual and decentralised, with hospitals, transplant teams, and logistics partners coordinating across multiple locations. The fact that so many different people, systems, and organisations are involved—without a centralised, real-time optimised process—makes it a race against time and circumstance. There’s nothing in place to handle all the variables—just hospitals calling hospitals, relying on outdated processes and hoping the organs arrive in time.
While these external organisations and advanced transport methods do their best, the reality is that inefficiencies in the system often result in organs being lost or delivered too late to save lives. Occasionally, because these organs have no real-time tracking systems, doctors are unsure of how much time has truly passed. This is very dangerous as transplanting an organ that exceeds its viability window can lead to rejection in the body of a patient.
These are the current realities of organ transport. Sarah’s gift of life, intended for multiple recipients, can be jeopardised simply due to logistical inefficiencies. It is worth mentioning that there are advanced technologies to preserve organs longer, but they come at high costs. One popular solution costs £250,000 to make and is set at £50,000 per use, excluding those who can't afford such expensive solutions, limiting access to this life-saving operation. With almost 25,000 people on the waiting lists for organ transplantation in the EU each year, the system is in desperate need of optimisation to ensure that more lives can be saved in less time, and with fewer barriers to access.
Project Story: Revolutionising Organ Transport in the UK
What Inspired Us
The organ transplant system in the UK is heavily constrained by time, cost, and accessibility. It’s a very manual process, extremely disorganised and decentralised as seen above in Sarah's story.
A key discovery we made during our research was that much of the industry’s focus has been on extending the life of organs with expensive preservation technologies. While these innovations extend the viability window of organs, they also reduce access for those who can't afford the high costs—such as £50,000 to rent a life-extending device, which can make organ transplants financially inaccessible for many. We saw an opportunity to shift the focus from merely extending organ life to optimising the delivery process to ensure timely, cost-effective, and widespread access to life-saving organs.
What We Learned
As we explored the organ transplant landscape, we realised how decentralised and manual the current system is. Organ transport is prone to delays due to unpredictable events such as weather, traffic, and logistical mismanagement. There’s also a lack of real-time tracking and optimisation, meaning that many organs are lost in transit or fail to reach recipients within the critical viability window and in error may sometimes even still be transplanted.
We also learned that democratising access to transplants may simply require addressing these inefficiencies rather than attempting to extend organ life with costly devices. By focusing on optimising transport and logistics, we could create a fairer system where more people, regardless of their financial situation, have access to organs within the natural viability window.
How We Built the Project
To address these challenges, we set out to create an optimised organ transportation system. The project was built around two core innovations:
AI-Driven Matching and Routing: We use an AI algorithm that prioritises organ recipients based on medical urgency, blood and size matching, time spent waiting, and geographic proximity. AI also analyses real-time conditions such as weather and traffic to select the quickest and safest transport method, whether by ambulance, bike, or even tube. At the immediate point of organ(s) availability, the algorithm computes the best recipient(s) within each organ’s natural viability window, based on all the above factors.
Shock-Proof Gyroscopic Smart Carrier: The heart of our solution is a gyroscopic organ smart carrier that uses sorbethane material to absorb shocks and vibrations, ensuring the organ remains stable during transit. The carrier is designed to handle various forms of transport without risking damage to the organ. It also has a GPS tracker and a timer that starts counting once the device has been locked to visualise how much time has passed since the organ has been locked in. This is as opposed to manual inaccurate methods of tracking when organs leave hospitals. This is especially important because transplanting organs that have passed their viability windows in error often is the leading cause of organ rejection in recipients.
Challenges We Faced
We faced several engineering and logistical challenges during the development of this system:
Cost vs. Accessibility: We had to ensure that the technology we were using was affordable enough to make the system accessible. By opting for gyroscopic technology—used in spill-proof baby bowls—and affordable materials like sorbethane for the walls of the carrier, we were able to build a cost-effective solution.
Real-Time Optimisation: Building an AI system capable of analysing multiple real-time variables—like weather, traffic, and geographic conditions—while ensuring the fastest delivery route was no easy feat. We overcame this by integrating multiple data sources into our algorithm, ensuring it could adapt to unforeseen circumstances.
Data Security and Privacy: Since organ recipients' medical data is sensitive, we had to design a secure database where each patient is assigned a unique number to maintain confidentiality, while still providing essential information for matching.
What We Achieved
Through this project, we’ve created a system that optimises organ transport without relying on expensive life-extension technologies. This approach not only makes the process more affordable but also ensures organs are delivered to recipients within the natural viability window, democratising access to life-saving transplants.
Our solution has the potential to significantly reduce the number of lost organs and ensure that more people receive transplants in time. By using a design engineering approach to solve this complex logistical problem, we believe we’ve taken a significant step towards equalising access to organ transplants across the UK.
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