Manipal students win MIT’s COVID-19 Hackathon

NEW DELHI: A team of three students from Manipal Institute of Technology has won the COVID-19 Hackathon organised by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in the US.

The 48-hour ‘Beat the Pandemic’ hackathon aimed at managing the critical issues arising due to coronavirus pandemic.

There were about 1,500 participants from over 75 countries and over 250 mentors.

The participants had to find possible solutions to the challenging scenarios that are emerging across the world due to COVID-19.

The hackathon was primarily focused on two sections – ‘protecting vulnerable populations’ and ‘helping health systems’.

The participant teams had to identify and shortlist problems and generate relevant and feasible solutions.

The team from Manipal Institute of Technology was declared as winners of the hackathon for their invention of Track - ‘Who to test and when’. A ‘TeleHealth’ platform, it was pitched as the solution to their identified problem of overcrowded hospitals with inappropriate admissions where less than five percent of the average population under 50 years of age required hospitalisation.

The winning team from Manipal Institute of Technology included Akshatha Kamath from computer science engineering, Shubham Rateria from computer and communication engineering, and Adri Rajaraman from electronics and communication engineering. They worked with Melia Watson, a respiratory therapist based in Washington DC, Hsiang Wei Hu, cofounder of Acusense Biomed in Taiwan, and Mariane Melo, a doctor based in the UK.

They will now have an opportunity to further develop their invention with the support of their partners and incorporate it into tele-medicine platforms.

Also read:

• MHRD launches “Samadhan” challenge to fight COVID-19
• Fighting COVID-19: MHRD, AICTE launches IDEAthon

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