Manipal: Students of Manipal Institute of Technology, MAHE bag first prize in the “Tech fest” event organised by IIT Mumbai. The team of students who bagged the prize are

·        Paresh K V, 4th Year, ECE, 170907146 (Team Leader)

·        Sai Aravind Chinthanippu, 4th Year, Mechatronics, 170929144

·        Anukul Jindal, 4th Year, ECE, 170907240

·        Sreerag Mahadevan Cheeroth, 4th Year, Mechanical, 170909085 

Prevention is better than cure, they say. Nothing could be truer than this in the case of the COVID19 pandemic that is spreading rampantly and leaving thousands dead in its wake.

With the Corona virus spreading like wildfire in the country, IIT Bombay’s annual technical event ‘TechFest’, wanted students to innovate and find ways to stop the spread of the virus, and distribute vaccines after its successful invention. The event was sponsored by L&T Electrical and Automation.

The problem statement was to develop a model that can be put in place to achieve this goal by devising methods that are practical, applicable, and cost-effective.

Our solution was to introduce a vest consisting of wearable electronics and sensors that could be used to keep a track of various physiological data of the user’s body like heart rate, pulse rate, oxygen content and body temperature. It then transfers this data wirelessly to a cloud server through Wifi. The collected data is checked and keeps a track of the abnormalities and if any, it sends an alert to the respective health care authorities along with the user’s location. In the case of the unavailability of Wi-Fi, a SMS is sent. So, our system can work with or without Wifi. This helps in providing a quick response to stabilize the health condition of the patients and thus helps in preventing the spread of the virus. Our idea was judged on creativity, scalability, cost/ market value and various other factors.

The event comprised of three rounds. The first round was judged based on an abstract submitted on our idea, the second round was judged on a detailed report on the working of our model and in the third round we had to submit a 18 – minute pre-recorded presentation with our final results. The event started on Nov 3rd and ended on the 5th of Jan.

With over 250+ registrations for the event and spread across more than 7 Countries and 3 Rounds, this event has helped us learn a lot and more than anything, it gave us an opportunity to do something that can actually be beneficial to society.