Several engineering college students in the city have come up with apps, websites and in some cases, prototypes of low-cost ventilators.
A group of students from Meenakshi Sundararajan Engineering College have developed a prototype for a low cost ventilator (₹11,500) which has now been shortlisted by the National Innovation Foundation for its C3 competition.
Kishore Kumaran, a 2017 batch ECE graduate leads a team of six juniors, four of whom are currently students at the college. It took them 17 days to develop the prototype. “It is an opportunity for shared learning,” says Mr. Kishore.
A third year CSE student S.R. Sankar Narayanan has developed a website for tracking COVID-19 http://coronanewapp.herokuapp.com/ . He uses government data for the purpose.
Four first year students of SSN College of Engineering developed an app to track quarantined people.
Sabesh Bharathi K. of IT Department and Sree Harine G, Santhosh Srinivas L, Sandhya B, all from the ECE department came up with a winning solution for an online contest organised by two chapters of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in Hyderabad and Bengaluru and the IEEE India Council.
The IEEE COVID Move hackathon was held in March-end. The students had to provide their winning workable prototype by April 15. The extended lockdown has given them further time to finetune their app.
“When we started developing, there were no apps. Now there is Aarogya Setu but our app is very different. Aarogya Setu doesn’t provide the map of the user when they step out. Our app had been built with a map assuming that all those in the locality being mapped have been identified.
According to Sree Harine, the app could be used to track any infection. “It is always possible to add in more diseases. The main purpose of our app is to trace the spread of a disease, how it spreads, how to control and prevent it,” said Santhosh.
R. Abilash Chakravarthy, a 24-year-old B.E. Mechanical Engineering graduate has used 3D printing to develop a prototype of a ventilator. He is looking for opportunities to test run his product.
Rajalakshmi Institutions’ Haree S Meganathan along with a group of faculty and a student from ECE, have developed an AI-based platform to detect COVID-19 cases.
The AI (Artificial Intelligence) tool is based on neural network to detect COVID-19, CAP (Community-Acquired Pneumonia) and normal condition from chest x-ray images. The developers used over 14,000 images in the training process and the tool has testing accuracy of 95.4%. “This quick and accurate tool will be provided free of cost to all government and private hospitals,” he said.
