MYSURU: Seventeen-year-old Deepti Ganapati Hegde has made Mysureans proud by winning first place at the 6th India International Science Festival (IISF-2020) under the ‘Navbharat Nirman’ domain.
Studying in 1st PUC at BASE PU College, Mysuru, Deepti was the sole representative from the city in the finals and won a cash amount of Rs 25,000. The event saw over 3000 participants up to the age of 45.
She presented the concept of “Building self-reliant smart villages for inclusive growth", a diverse smart healthcare system, for digital rural empowerment. She had developed digital therapeutic programmes that follow rural pregnant women, elderly people and cardiac patients in their homes.
The goal of the project is to capture personal sensor data and sift it for early signs of potential exacerbations to help monitor the progress of the patient and guide prompt interventions.
Deepti has developed a device in the form of a smart band, worn on the upper arm or wrist, which can measure 10 different parameters in real-time along with a few COVID symptoms like basic body temperature, BPM, cough symptoms etc.
This band can be coupled with a mobile app that receives data from it, which is sent to a cloud server. The cloud-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) engine uses state of the art machine learning algorithms in early prediction of heart failure exacerbation, cardiac arrhythmias for cardiac patients and other symptoms for the antenatal care of pregnant women.
Whenever the AI agent predicts something is wrong, it sends emergency alert notifications to family members, friends, the doctor at the hospital and the ambulance along with the current location of the patient which can be used to immediately give the necessary medical attention. This technology can be used in a remote-monitoring and disease-surveillance programme and is built using IoMT (internet of medical things), MEMS and NLP.
Speaking to The New Indian Express, Deepti said, “Healthcare has become a luxury for the poor and rural people and the situation has only worsened after the COVID-19 outbreak. Rural healthcare is one of the biggest challenges the country faces. With more than 70 per cent of the population living in rural areas and low level of health facilities, mortality rates due to diseases are on the rise.”
“People in rural areas generally have less access to healthcare than their urban counterparts. It's very important to digitise the rural healthcare system and we need to come out with more innovative solutions. A health monitoring system that tracks vital biological data coupled with modern-day technologies like Artificial Intelligence is the need of the hour. Through connectivity and collaboration, rural hospitals are large enough to serve our community's health needs, but we are also small enough to care. The wearable technology, which I am working on, can be implemented on a rental basis with minimal charge, for instance, the pregnant band could be given on rent up to the period of 7-8 months till delivery for Rs 300,” she added.
IISF 2020 is an integral part of India’s long term vision in developing the spectrum of scientific temper in India and abroad. The 6th India International Science Festival (IISF-2020) was jointly organised by the Department of Biotechnology, Ministry of Science and Technology and Ministry of Earth Sciences virtually with 10 lakh+ delegates from all over the world.