From ventilators to VR-based rehabilitation system, IIIT-B unveils projects to revolutionise healthcare sector

Bengaluru Tech Summit 2020: IIIT-B unveils 11 ambitious projects! With the Bengaluru Tech Summit 2020 coming to an end on Saturday, the prestigious International Institute of Information Technology, Bengaluru (IIIT-B) revealed as many as 11 projects that would aid the fields of education, medicine and agriculture with the use of technology. The institute, as reported earlier by Financial Express Online, has been working actively, especially during the pandemic, to tackle some of the issues that the administration or people have been facing. However, the institute is continuously working on new projects in various fields, and 11 new projects that are in various stages of development have now been announced.

So what are these 11 projects? Let’s take a look.

MedTech projects

The IIIT-B is developing six MedTech projects to aid the healthcare sector of the country.

Medtech4Bharath

Medtech4Bharath is a proposed platform through which IIIT-B hopes to render TeleCure with the help of high-end devices. With this, the team hopes to provide medical care to patients in the remote areas from Motihari to Bengaluru by connecting the primary health centres in these areas to specialists in urban areas. The college aims to benefit the patients by connecting specialists to these centres so that any issues regarding diagnosis or equipment can be solved remotely without compromising on the quality or expertise.

Bionic Yantra or Exoskeleton

After a patient undergoes surgery or an accident, they need physiotherapy to resume the movement of their body. However, the patients also tend to take longer due to their fear of causing more damage. Thus, a team at IIIT-B has developed the Bionic Yantra which aims to rehabilitate the elderly and the differently abled people with the help of virtual reality. Using Immersive VR the Bionic Yantra would aim to bring locomotive rehabilitation to elderly, differently abled and even veterans who have been injured in line of duty.

Karnataka Mental Healthcare Management System – E-Manas

As reported earlier by Financial Express Online, the institute had been working on the development of an app to act as an aggregator between mental health caregivers and the patients. The app has been developed, launched and now also showcased at the Bengaluru Tech Summit. E-Manas is a platform which contains a registry of all the facilities and professionals in Karnataka that provide mental health care. Apart from that, the platform also includes a asic repository of the medical records of patients suffering from mental illness across the state.

The app aims to cater to mental health professionals, institutions, facilities as well as the patients and their caregivers, and it also hopes to provide continuity in the care of mental health patients who seek OPD and IP services.

Anthropomimetic Upper Limb Device

With this project, the team hopes to build devices to rehabilitate a patient with the help of assisting hands, forearms, wrists and arm movements in the upper limb. The aim is to develop an electronically controlled robotic mechanism which would fill in the increasing demand for stroke rehabilitation. This is important because of the limited existing devices and the shortage of therapists.

As per the information provided to FE Online by IIIT-B, “The proposed device is an aiding tool to the clinical practice and allows patients to work on their own without being physically present in a clinic and report accurate quantitative results to the medical doctors.”

BeIYo

As per the IIIT-B, BeIYo is a blockchain platform which would issue test results for COVID-19 and certificates of vaccination. These would be verifiable in real-time and would not be counterfeited.

Ventilator

The IIIT-B had been working on developing an open-source ventilator design which would use indigenous parts and be assembled in a very short period of time. This would be a medical grade ventilator and the institute decided to go for the project because of the lack of ventilators in the healthcare system. It would be a low-cost and reliable alternative to ventilators during shortage, the institute hopes.

In the last interaction, IIIT-B Director Prof Sadagopan had told FE Online that due to the lockdown, the project was facing delays, but had hoped that it would take off soon, and it seems like that time has come.

EdTech projects

Not limiting themselves to the healthcare sector, the institute is working on the education sector as well.

Margadarshi or Interview Assisting System

The institute is hoping to develop a virtual interviewing bot which would conduct mock interviews to aid aspiring IAS officers. It aims to cater to aspirants who are economically underprivileged and reside in remote areas.

Speech technologies

IIIT-B is hoping to conduct research and development in the area of intelligent multi-lingual voice-enabled access to e-gov portal services as well as gateways. The institute is looking at speech technologies in Hindi, English and Kannada, and technologies like spoken-dialog information retrieval system, rich transcription of spoken corpus, and language translation engines.

Automated assessment

The institute is hoping to develop a cutting-edge technology to automate assessment in terms of generation, conduction as well as evaluation, to make it continuous and integrate it into a system for personalised learning.

Traffic Simulation Models

IIIIT-B is hoping to explore architecture and design of generic architectures for Agent Based Social Systems (ABSS) to seamlessly implement them over parallel architectures. ”These models will be used for building traffic simulation models that can be used in urban traffic management,” IIIT-B said.

Agri-Tech project

Apart from this, the institute also has a project for the agriculture sector.

Bar chart digitizer

The institute aims to automate the data extraction from charts by exploiting local structure estimation in chart images to assist agriculture workers and farmers.