BENGALURU: 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 health of people who have contracted COVID-19 or those who may have it.
This comes at a time when various states are staring at a shortage of personal protective equipment for health care workers who are expected to check home-quarantined people. This system will reduce the number of times health care workers are exposed to people they check on.
It will also reduce the need to travel which is difficult due to the lockdown. 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 patients, a team of experts will assess complaints, and patients will be handed a kit to monitor critical health parameters periodically. Meanwhile, if the health parameters exceed normal thresholds, or if patient’s condition worsens, 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 patient’s condition.
Through the patient’s mobile phone or integral GSM SIM, his/her location will also be recorded on the cloud-based centralised command and control centre (CCC), as and when they update their health parameters. Since the cloud is used, databases can be scaled up seamlessly. “The CCC’s data analytics software will also graphically map the geo-distribution of COVID-19 suspects/patients in the state. This will help the hospital administrations in visualising hot spots and taking necessary action to isolate and cordon-off these areas to check the spread of the virus,” said an official 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, said the release.