BENGALURU: An innovative app to detect fake medicine peddled in the market to unwitting patients - DrugSafe - developed by students of RV College of Engineering has secured $15,000 Big Data Award at the 2018 Imagine Cup World Championship held at Seattle.
The app developed by Chidroop I, Pratik Mohapatra and Srihari HS - all fifth-semester students of computer engineering - won the special award in Big Data category, which was one of the three fields apart from Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Mixed Reality, where students from across the world hadtni submitted projects.
What does the app do?
The app attempts to tackle the global problem of counterfeit drugs by allowing any individual with DrugSafe app to verify whether the medicine they brought was authentic or not. "The team encountered the issue of fake medicines when one of their friends showed no signs of recovery after weeks of taking a prescribed medication. Learning that nearly half of all medicines sold in India were fake, they decided to create an app that could authenticate medicines and trace them back to their source," Microsoft, in a statement, said.
By using Optical Character Recognition, the app makes a preliminary analysis of details in design and packaging of medicine to compare them with the original manufacturers' trademark and attributes. The app uses two more levels of checks to flag the discrepancies and identifies the authenticity of the medicine.
Though the app makes use of machine learning and artificial intelligence assisted statistical analysis, it has a simple user interface to ensure that anybody could use it.
Second time lucky
This was the second time the students were participating in the contest. Last year, though the team had developed an anonymous energy response system they could not qualify for the finals. In 2018, they were one of the three teams representing India.
Speaking to Express, Prof Shobha G, Head of Computer Science Department said that the team had to compete with 10,000 teams in India regional round of the contest. "Three teams from India and 45 from other countries participated in the last round of the contest," she said.
Prof K N Subramanya, Principal of the College said that the app was designed to benefit the common man.