IIT Mandi researchers develop AI-driven home quarantine management application for COVID-19 patients

LakshmanRekha home quarantine management application for COVID-19 patients: Since the Coronavirus pandemic broke last year, authorities and people around the world have struggled to contain and monitor Covid-19 positive patients from breaching home and institutional quarantine rules. To stop Coronavirus from spreading it is necessary to ensure that an infected patient remains quarantined, but as we have often seen this is difficult to enforce. To mitigate this, researchers at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Mandi have developed what is a first-of-its-kind mobile application that can continuously monitor and accurately detect the identity of a quarantined person so that no patient can breach the assigned geo-fence.

The app called LakshmanRekha – is an Artificial Intelligence and biometric-driven Home Quarantine Management Application (HQMA) for COVID-19 patients which uses a combination of biometric verification, geo-fencing and artificial intelligence to continuously monitor and accurately detect the identity of a home quarantined persons. In addition to the quarantine management, this application can also serve as an unbreachable mobile phone platform for normal (non-COVID) mobile users, situations like under curfew, or any national emergency, for identifying the violators or lawbreakers.

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The results of the research work that was funded by the Department of Science and Technology has been authored by the lead scientist on this research Dr. Aditya Nigam, Assistant Professor, School of Computing & Electrical Engineering – IIT Mandi, and co-investigator on the study Dr. Arnav Bhavsar; along with research scholars Daksh Thapar and Piyush Goyal of IIT Mandi, with Dr. Gaurav Jaiswal from IIT Delhi and Dr. Kamlesh Tiwari and Rohit Bhardwaj of BITS Pilani.

Speaking about the app, Dr Nigam said, “We have developed a pilot version of LakshmanRekha mobile application and tested it over small datasets. The obtained results are very good and now we are working to add more functionality, scalability and usability to make it ready for deployment.”

The application matches the quarantine location of the individual with the location from where they upload the biometric data. Along with this, using AI, the application can continually compute an authentication score that can measure how certain it is, that the quarantined user is also the one using the mobile. It can also directly notify the authorities if it detects that the user identity has been changed.