BENGALURU: Bengaluru-based startup Intugine Technologies has contributed to the efforts of ensuring strict compliance to social distancing guidelines. Founded by Mrinal Rai, Harshit Shrivastava and Ayush Agrawal, the logistics solution startup uses a phone number based sms tracking system which initiates tracking once the quarantine individuals provide user consent.
“Once the government authorities upload patients’ details on our platform, an sms goes out to each patient stating the guidelines and requesting their consent for being tracked during home quarantine.
Once they accept the request, tracking is initiated on our platform using cell-tower triangulation at a certain frequency,” says Shrivastava adding that in the case of breaches or violations, authorities are alerted automatically. Shrivastava further emphasised that developing this tracker wasn’t an uphill task due to their logistics tracking platform which was built over a course of two years. He adds, “It’s the same platform used for our logistic tracking of vehicles.
For the COVID tracker app, GPS based tracker which was launched to assist Goa Government, we had tweaked the platform which only took a couple days to update. All this was possible since we already had a system in place.” Speaking on the privacy of data, Shrivastava asserts that data is accessible only to designated authorities and company professionals. It is erased once the quarantine period of the patient is completed. Currently it’s active in five states – Maharashtra, Arunachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Goa and Madhya Pradesh. Ask him if Karnataka is on the cards for this city-based and Srivastava says, “Ironically, we are a Bengaluru-based company but we are yet to connect with the right individuals. It’s not that the authorities aren’t cooperating, I think it’s a matter of reach. It’s been a little over a week since we have started with the tracker and hopefully it will be implemented here as well.”