GUNTUR: Wristwatch designed by 21-year-old ANU student from Guntur district can detect if a person is in distress, share GPS location with authorities and family members; not electricity or battery but it uses body heat to operate
Technology can be a solution to many problems. A 21-year-old engineering student has designed a wristwatch that can detect if a person is in distress and share his/her GPS location with the nearest police station, hospital or even family members in just 10 seconds. The tech can be helpful, especially for women.
Bethala Geeta Chandra Raju, now in his final year of engineering (mechanical branch) at College of Engineering and Technology, Acharya Nagarjuna University, says the watch, which he designed almost three years ago, uses body motions and the nearby sounds to analyse the situation a person is in. His product, which converts body heat into electricity and can work without charging or batteries, was among the top 10 innovations at Smart India Hackathon, 2018.
Captivated by science and innovations even in his school days, Raju says: “We read about people dying in accidents almost every day. Many die because help does not reach them in time. So I wanted to do something about it and the result was the ‘self-powered rape and accident detection’ watch.”Speaking about his future plans, he says he has a few ideas that he can work on, but, instead, wants to develop the watch first so that it can be used on a daily basis. “All it takes is a bit of encouragement and guidance for innovations to thrive.”
Explaining one of his other projects that won in the 2020 edition of Smart India Hackathon, he says: “In 2019, many states were badly affected by floods, and about 1,600 people died. On doing research, I found that the deaths were mostly due to the delay in identification of trapped people. So I and my classmates Naga Sai Ganesh, Manikanta, Sidhartha, Praneetha developed an unmanned aerial vehicle with image processing capability that helps in identification of the trapped, with the help of machine learning, during floods and other disasters. RGB and thermal camera work simultaneously for its effective use during nights even in the presence of trees and bushes. To achieve this, we created an efficient dataset with 96 per cent accuracy for image processing.”
The UAV, designed for inspection in flood-hit areas, can be operated from any location within 150 kilometres. “Wi-Fi, GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) or Internet may get hit and stop working during disasters. So we used a different approach for effective and long-range communication. We created a module and developed a mobile application that uses offline GPS location. The range of this device is more than 150 km.
The mobile application takes data and plots the location of the trapped on the map, allowing rescue and search teams to directly go to that specific location instead of searching the whole area,’’ he explained his group’s recent venture. The university’s startup and innovation cell encourages students like Raju to experiment with their ideas. Assistant Professor Md Touseef Ahmad, coordinator of the cell, played a significant role in their achievement.