A dedicated team of researchers at IIT Bombay, along with some professional and experienced alumni, have built a platform, CORONTINE, that can be used to track potential/suspected (asymptomatic) carriers of the novel coronavirus.
CORONTINE is a flexible, comprehensive, scalable and ready-to-use platform and app that can be helpful for authorities to register the asymptomatic carriers and track them to check whether they remain confined to their quarantined zones. IIT Bombay has hitherto been using the app to track attendance in its classes. CORONTINE allows to geo-fence and automatically generates alerts (SMS, email, etc.,) if users move out of the quarantined zone.
"The platform is extremely customisable to the needs of the agencies and will be great for contact tracking by the authorities. It can help people know if they have contact with somebody suffering from COVID-19; they can save their loved ones by letting the authorities know earlier if the latter may have COVID-19 and, of course, they can help the nation by tracking who all might be affected in the community. If a positive person is visiting other areas after leaving his quarantine area, those hot spots can be identified. Live tracking with the help of GPS is possible," says Milind Atrey, dean, research and development at IIT Bombay.
The app can be installed on the mobile phones of asymptomatic carriers (AC) by an authorised agency. The app sends GPS coordinates of the mobile phones periodically to a server under the supervision of that agency. If a user leaves a specified quarantined zone marked by a geo-fence, it will be auto-detected. Details of how to configure the app and the server to track the movement of asymptomatic carriers can be found in the user manual that comes along with CORONTINE.
"This app [CORONTINE] has been customised for the COVID-19 fight. This app is essentially for those who are quarantined. They need to register themselves on the app and all they need is a mobile phone. The app will have the contact details of each person. He has to give his attendance at random times using the app by which there will be call alerts on the phone. So the best part is that the CORONTINE app can monitor over 1,000 at any given time and at any place to keep a track of the quarantine etiquette being followed or not," explains Atrey.
At the same time, a team led by professor Bhaskaran Raman and professor Kameswari Chebrolu of the department of CSE, IIT Bombay, has developed the SAFE app, which can be used by officials for checking quarantine adherence.
According to the professors, SAFE has three dimensions of verification: Location, identity and time. It is capable of detecting cases where the person may leave the phone and go outside quarantine himself/herself. Also, the SAFE app is time-tested as it has been in use since the last five years and has been used for classroom attendance by thousands of students in various courses.
Students and faculty at IIT Bombay together have also made red-coloured masks, which are being used by the students and staff at the institute's premises. Two faculty members of IDC school of design, Desai Sethi School of Entrepreneurship at IIT Bombay—professors P. Kumaresan and Purba Joshi—are involved in the effort to make masks. The team are making an instructional video too about 'how to make masks using common household items'. They have completed making 40 masks in 16 hours and plan to make 1,000 more, for use by IIT Bombay security and hospital staff.
Another innovation coming from IIT Bombay, which can be of great help as the country fights the novel coronavirus, is the portable UV sanitiser that can help in the sanitisation of wallets, purses and other small items. The portable UV sanitiser was made by professors Ambarish Kunwar, Kumaresan and Joshi. The prototype was made using stainless steel and aluminium mesh and then tested. The team took about four hours to make it.
IIT Bombay have two prototypes of the UV sanitiser currently and would like to scale it as much as possible.
