Tag: ehealth

Alumni Innovate COVID-19 Health Technologies

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The cases of infections and deaths related to COVID-19 in India are increasing by leaps and bounds. While it took about 2 months to reach the first 1000 cases, it increased to 2000 just within 5 days, then with every 3 days the count has been increasing by 1000, and now the frequency of that occurrence has reduced to a day. Today the COVID+ cases have crossed 8000. Though experts concur that the lockdown has checked the spread of the disease till now to a considerable extent, the need for eHealth technologies is crucial in a country with a billion+ people under home quarantine. Four alumni starts-ups from IIT Kharagpur have developed technologies to offer assistance towards surveillance, mass-scale sanitization and automatization of  dissemination of official information related to novel coronavirus.

Surveillance

Innovaccer, a data-driven healthcare technology start-up co-founded by Abhinav Shashank and Kanav Hasija from 2010 batch, has has launched a self-assessment based app to screen for COVID-19 patients. The self-assessment test asks users to fill in a survey based on their symptoms. It also provides coronavirus-related updates to citizens in the region.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has posed a serious challenge to current healthcare infrastructure. While our providers are tirelessly treating thousands of patients every day, we want to help them in this global health crisis by expanding their reach. To help the government, healthcare organizations and all frontline healthcare workers care as one, we are launching COVID-19 Management System to enable virtual care,” says Abhinav Shashank, CEO of Innovaccer.

Health authorities of Goa and Puducherry have tied up with Innovaccer to curb the spread of novel CoronaVirus pandemic with the Automated Self-evaluation Assessment to Identify At-Risk Patients for COVID-19.

In another such initiative, Intugine, co-founded by IIT Kharagpur alumni Harshit Shrivastava (2016 batch) and Ayush Agrawal (2018 batch), is using their flagship product ‘Mobile Number Location Tracking’ to monitor huge number of home-quarantined individuals and ensure they follow social distancing. The Kgpians claim that their location intelligence platform, which is based on cell triangulation technology, can work on SMS-based user content without installing any application, i.e. even on basic phones, which makes it easy to implement. 

The company has recently announced that this solution can enable effective crowd monitoring of quarantined cases in a least intrusive and scalable manner, on a single dashboard with a central control tower, reducing the pressure on the ground teams to visit each location and ensure adherence.

“Our logistics platform fits seamlessly in providing a solution to the coronavirus monitoring. Upon understanding it better, we quickly tweaked our platform by conducting a pilot in a handful of districts to check the feasibility,” says Ayush Agrawal.

He confirmed getting positive response as well in detecting the breaches of home quarantined cases and reaching out to appropriate authorities who can put the platform to use for surveillance.

Mass-scale Sanitisation and Sterilization

While surveillance of the population is critical, a significant section of the population engaged in essential services are required to regularly access public spaces. Alumnus Debayan Saha collaboratively developed Airlens Minus Corona, a device which may help sanitise large areas. The innovators claim that the product might be able to address the challenge by using charged water droplets which are ionised using the viral discharge.

“Alcohols (like ethanol or IPA) are known to inactivate viruses by denaturing their protein coat. But the alcohol-based hand sanitiser is useful for individuals or for sanitising surfaces at a smaller scale (home, offices, etc.) in the fight against coronavirus. However, this is insufficient in such an emergency as it is impractical to use alcohol for sanitising cities,” said Saha.

The device is designed to look like Robo Sapien (human-like) machine that operates on the mechanism of charged water droplets which are ionised using the corona discharge. The ionised water in return oxidises the viral protein reducing it to a non-harmful molecule, opined the innovators. The innovators are hoping to reach out to organisations and government bodies for large scale application.

Bot

While media is reporting on health status, government announcements related to COVID-19, people may have queries regarding the lifestyle to follow beyond social distancing and hygiene guidelines. Apollonius Voicebot developed by alumnus Souva Majumder is addressing such queries. People can record their queries on the platform denguebot.in which are answered by an AI application. The bot has integrated information provided by the World Health Organization, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Govt. of India, and My Gov platform.

COVID-19 has reaffirmed the need for technology based hygiene and healthcare, which may not fade away with the situation normalising but rather lead to a future which cause less damage from pandemic, which may not require global lockdown.

This article only shares information about technological innovations by the alumni and is neither an endorsement nor can be used as a statement of validation  for the above mentioned interventions.

If you are alumni, faculty or student of IIT Kharagpur and working in the following areas, please share your story on media@iitkgp.ac.in.

  • Personal protective equipment,
  • Surveillance,
  • Sanitization,
  • Testing kit,
  • Development of medical equipment, bots,
  • Pharmacological or non-pharmacological treatment,
  • Data analytics and AI to model epidemic patterns and disease dynamics

Smartphone App to Aid Smoking Cessation

Smartphone applications in the present times are the popular source of information on market intelligence. In the last decade, these gadgets have been revolutionizing the consumer world by replacing our wallets and bringing services such as cabs, restaurants, shops, IoT based smart homes at our doorsteps. These are also contributing to our fitness regime. But smartphones can give a lot more insights, they can tell what we are doing at the moment, our habits and the associated health hazards. This is what researchers at IIT KGP have confirmed through their latest innovation.

A research team led by Prof. Ram Babu Roy at IIT KGP’s Rajendra Mishra School of Engineering Entrepreneurship (RMSoEE), has developed a prototype of sensor-based activity tracking kit which can monitor the activities in daily living. Further, a Smartphone-based application is under development which will analyze the tracking kit data and send alerts for an unhealthy lifestyle and suitable recommendation. The innovation is a sensor-based technology for automated recognition of addictive and depressive behaviour.

While India is reaching a critical threshold for killer diseases like cancer and depression, there is an emerging need for a shift from sick care to preventive care. This issue can be addressed at a faster rate through e-healthcare considering the inadequate availability of professional caregivers and medical practitioners.

“The scenario led us to explore the most commonly used gadget and develop the much-required technology which can be used for providing interventions in near real-time via mobile app to promote cessation from addictive habits,” remarked Saurabh Singh Thakur, a research scholar at IIT KGP RMSoEE.

The technology is capable of producing a daily activity chart based on body movements especially of the hands and predict daily functions such as eating or drinking water or behavioural tendencies such as smoking or consumption of alcohol. The application can also monitor call and message logs and internet usage on the smartphone and alert the user or the caregiver regarding cell phone usage. Prolonged usage data would indicate poor sleeping habit thus predicting possible health hazards.

“We did a pilot study over a period of time capturing data on activities of daily living with the help of a mobile app developed for android phones. The different activities captured are a marker of various physiological and psychological health. The data collected was dependent on the time of the day when it was captured thus demarcating the normal and abnormal activities. Further, data analysis is being carried out to identify various behavioral activities and patterns to do behavioural profiling of individuals. This could lead to enabling of personalized e-healthcare services through a smartphone,” said Prof. Ram Babu Roy, who is leading this innovation at IIT KGP RMSoEE.

The activity tracking kit has been developed using a 6-axis inertial sensor along with a heart rate sensor which could be worn on the wrist. A pilot study was conducted with four participants. Their hand movement pattern was recorded for around 5 minutes for smoking and non-smoking intervals each, using this kit. Preliminary analysis of the data showed that there exists a periodicity in the data during the smoking episode. During the non-smoking interval, the sensor signals are random and do not exhibit such periodicity.

Further data collection with a greater number of participants in different environments, data pre-processing, analysis, training, model generation, and testing is under progress. The research team collected GPS data as well for locational information and physical movement. There is a correlation between physical activities during the day and psychological health. Thus, such data analysis would further help in strengthening the mental health and wellness of the user.

The need of such a technology can be more emphasized at the wake of the reports by Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and National Mental Health Survey (NMHS). While according to ICMR, new cancer cases or its incidence in India are estimated to grow by 25% by 2020, NMHS 2015-16 reports that every sixth person in India needs mental health intervention of some sort.

The prototype developed at IIT KGP is initially focused on smoking habits. However, the research encompasses the scope of predicting depressive behavior as well. The team has published several peer-reviewed papers in international journal and conferences of repute. They are working towards filing a patent for further commercialization of the product.

“At the Rajendra Mishra School of Engineering Entrepreneurship, we encourage entrepreneurial minds of the engineering students. It is the first school of its kind in India and we focus on incubating innovations into start-ups. Considering the field reports and further test results and preferred career choices of the innovators, such innovations are quite capable of creating new markets,” affirmed Prof. Partha Pratim Das, Head, RMSoEE, IIT KGP.