With more than 2,902 positive cases and 68 deaths, India’s healthcare professionals are soon going to be overburdened with Covid-19 patients with very less facilities. From police personnels to Science enthusiasts are all trying to do their best to avoid this. While police personnels are using creative ways to spread awareness about the pandemic, the scientists and doctors are creating new inventions to reduce this burden.
The one thing that the healthcare system will really need is ventilators. Covid-19 can lead to severe lower respiratory infection, which means most of the patients often need ventilator support to help breathe.
Current availability in India is estimated to have between 30,000 and 50,000 ventilators but according to Johns Hopkins University, the demand for ventilators can be as high as 1 million in the country. India is anyway short of ventilators but considering the positive cases rose by 601 in the last 24 hours, the situation will get worse.
To make the situation better, Dr Deepak Agrawal, professor of neurosurgery at AIIMS, and Diwakar Vaish, a robotics scientist have developed the most cost effective ventilators. The inspiration to develop the ventilator came from the patients at AIIMS, who couldn’t go home until a year just because they were dependent on the ventilator.
So, they thought it’ll be better if these people could take the ventilator home, so they even made it portable. A regular ventilator costs somewhere between 4-5 lakhs but this ventilator costs about 1.5 lakh. The device costs nearly one-fifth of the existing ventilators in the hospitals.
Similarly, at Nagpur’s New Era hospital, doctors have developed a tool with which eight patients can be put on one ventilator at the same time. Though ventilator splitters are not new, this one is said to the first to serve eight patients at a time. The one in the past had been to serve four patients at a time.
Pulmonologist Dr Sameer Arbat in Butibori has designed a safety box for performing difficult bronchoscopy procedures in suspected or confirmed Covid-19 patients. Since Covid-19 spreads through coughing and sneezing, it is very risky to perform bronchoscopy procedures in suspected or confirmed Covid-19 patients.
The model made by him in the lockdown is already in use in various countries but he made an improvisation to make the box multipurpose for performing bronchoscopy as well as intubation procedures.
We all know that a lot of doctors who are at the frontline of fighting the pandemic don’t have personal protective equipment like masks and gloves, therefore Nurses in the Meditrina Institute of Medical Sciences made innovative use of the available material to design personal protection suite for them to deal with shortage of PPE kits and masks.
Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore with the help of various teams has developed eleven new technologies to help India fight against Covid-19. They developed a drone that can be used to disinfect areas that are difficult to access.
They also came up with ‘GoCoronaGo’ contact tracing app and network analytics will help identify people who may have crossed paths with Covid-19 positive subjects by tracking their interactions in the past using bluetooth and GPS.
The app uses temporal network analytics in the backend to understand disease spread and identify high-risk people who are likely to contract and spread the virus. It also provides isolation alerts and helps enhance social distancing.
It also has a geo-fencing feature for those who are under quarantine and has the ability to provide their symptoms which is used to evaluate the risks. Apart from these innovations, the institute is also planning to develop a UV-based disinfecting device that can be deployed in hospitals.
