KAWACH to ventilator parts, universities help fight coronavirus

NEW DELHI: With the number of cases of coronavirus infections rising daily, different institutions are coming up with innovative products to deal with the health crisis.

Premier technical institutions like Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) have developed hand sanitisers and even diagnostic tests, but even private universities say they have have joined the fight. They have creating devices that help with social distancing, parts of ventilators and applications to enable contact-tracing. However, it is too early to say how well they function or how feasible these products are for large-scale use.

Here are some of them.

KAWACH- For Social Distancing

Students of Lovely Professional University (LPU) have developed ‘KAWACH’, a low-cost device that assists with social distancing – a critical measure to prevent the spread of the deadly coronavirus. The university statement says that the device also has a hand wash reminder to remind people to wash hands every 30 minutes. The device, which can be worn as a pendant, vibrates and glows in case someone breaches the user’s safe space of one metre, it also has a temperature sensor to alert users if their body temperature crosses the prescribed limit.

Corona-Scan and Corona-Support

To check the spread of Covid-19, the engineering students of Sona College of Technology, Salem, and engineers of Vee Technologies, Bengaluru have created two apps ‘Corona-Scan’ and ‘Corona-Support’.

Corona-Scan allows public health officials to map individuals who were in close proximity with a possibly infected or active COVID-19 patient. Corona-Support asks the public for their voluntary registration if an individual tests positive a voluntary status update can be entered in the app, helping health authorities and experts tracking the spread of the virus get accurate information.

As per the college, by tracking and recording people within three to five metres every two minutes, the ‘Carona-Scan’ app generates live data of people in close proximity to one another. By mapping people who may have been infected and risk infecting others, public health officials can identify and take appropriate action to connect with them over the phone and keep them under observation, isolation or recommend testing. The ‘Carona-Scan’ app identifies how many times an individual has been near the infected person in the designated period.

However, as Chocko Valliappa, CEO of Vee Technologies put it, “The success of the two apps lies in rapidly growing the number of users voluntarily. More the number of users the better the chances of breaking the chain of community spread.”

Ventilator splitters

Chennai based SASTRA University has developed two-way and four-way ventilator splitters using 3D printing. This was developed at their Department of Science and Technology (DST) established Technology Business Incubator (TBI) facility. Union Human Resource Development Minister Dr Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank talking about the product wrote on twitter: “They (splitters) are ready to be tested and served (once approved) in hospitals to address the current ventilator shortage.”

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