BENGALURU: The Navaratna defence PSU Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) has collaborated with All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS)-Rishikesh to develop a state-of-the-art health monitoring system which can remotely assess the condition of COVID-19 suspects or patients who are quarantined in their homes or in hospitals.
This comes at a time when the country is staring at a shortage of Personal Protective Equipment for healthcare workers who are expected to check on the health of home quarantined persons. The health monitor will reduce the exposure of healthcare workers, while keeping a tab on patients.
As part of the system, people with COVID-19 symptoms will enrol on the mobile app or web browser developed by AIIMS-Rishikesh. While the institute will study the patient, a team of clinical experts will assess the complaints and the patient will be handed over a health monitoring kit for monitoring of critical parameters periodically.
In the meanwhile, if the health parameters exceed the threshold, the medical officers and health care workers will immediately receive an alert in the form of messages. The severity is also colour coded to know the condition of the patient.
Through the patient’s mobile phone or integral GSM SIM, the location will also be recorded to the centralised Command & Control Centre (CCC) which will be on the cloud, as and when they update their health parameters. Since the cloud is used, the database can be scaled up seamlessly.
Visualising hotspots
"Data analytics software of the CCC will also graphically map the geo-distribution of COVID-19 suspects/patients in the state. This would help the hospital administration in visualising the hot spots and taking necessary action to isolate and cordon off these areas to check the spread the virus," said the release.
While AIIMS-Rishikesh gave the inputs for the model, BEL developed the Proof of Concept (PoC) model of a system integrating non-invasive health monitoring sensors to measure critical parameters such as temperature, pulse rate, SPO2 (saturated oxygen level) and respiration rate, the release added.
With its expertise in Network Centric and IoT systems, BEL has networked these sensors that will help remotely monitor critical parameters.