A team of students from Manipal Institute of Technology (MIT) under Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE) — Paresh KV (team leader), Sai Aravind Chinthanippu, Anukul Jindal, and Sreerag Mahadevan Cheeroth — has won the first prize in the ‘Tech Fest’ organised by IIT Bombay.
This technical event wanted students to innovate and find ways to stop the spread of coronavirus and distribute vaccines. The problem statement was to develop a model that can be put in place by devising methods that are practical, applicable and cost-effective.
Innovative solution
The MIT team’s solution was to introduce a vest consisting of wearable electronics and sensors that could be used to keep a track of various physiological data of the user’s body such as heart rate, pulse rate, oxygen content and body temperature.
The data keeps a track of the abnormalities, if any, and sends an alert to the respective healthcare authorities along with the user’s location. Though the data is transferred wirelessly to a cloud server through Wi-Fi, the team also provided the option of transferring the data through SMS in the case of the unavailability of Wi-Fi.
Challenging case
The team members said that this helps in providing a quick response to stabilise the health condition of patients and helps in preventing the spread of the virus. The idea was judged on creativity, scalability, cost, market value and various other factors. The event included three rounds.
The first round was judged based on an abstract submitted on the idea, and the second round was judged on a detailed report on the working of the model. The team had to submit an 18-minute pre-recorded presentation with the final results in the third round.There were over 250 registrations for the event spread across more than seven countries.