This is how IITs have stepped up to fight Coronavirus
As the number of patients affected with novel Coronavirus rise every day, IITs have upped their A-game, to fight the disease with sufficient supply of essential equipment in this dire time of need. Let us have a quick look at what these brave hearts have been up to all this while!
Seeking Protection
When it comes to safety, health professionals are at maximum risk. To curb that, researchers are coming up with techniques that can help safeguard our doctors, nurses and everybody else who comes in direct contact with the patients.
Keeping this in mind, researchers from IIT Guwahati, from the departments of Bioscience & Bioengineering and Chemistry have come up with waterproof prototypes of protective gear that are created with an antiviral coating. Also, the design experts of the institute have developed a 3D-printed prototype of a shield that covers the entire face, including the headgear. The manufacturing of this is reported to be scaled up with immediate effect.
Another futuristic invention by the students of IIT-Guwahati has been made in order to lessen the burden of the medical system. To deal with this, this IIT is working on robotic units that have the ability to screen potential patients and delivering food and medicine in isolation wards.
Not only this, but students have also invented drones that can be put to use for spraying disinfectants. Additionally, these drones can be used to undertake surveillance, without human involvement. The students have already made 7 such drone-models that have capacities between 10 and 25 litres and are expected to make 50 more drones by April-end.
IIT Delhi hasn’t been far behind. A start-up that runs within the campus has developed a capacity that has the potential to produce 1,00,000 N-95 masks every day. But due to lockdown, it needs further permissions for production.
Curbing Chaos - Keeping things and patients in order
With as less as 6.8 tests done per million of the population, our country stands at the world’s lowest in terms of the number of tests being conducted. A shortage of the available kits for testing calls for a major concern, which has been addressed aptly by researchers at IIT Delhi.
They have developed testing kits that are cheaper than the ones that are currently available. These kits are undergoing clinical trials at the National Institute of Virology, Pune. Even though the price hasn’t been made public yet, the government has supposedly the capped the prices at INR 4,500 for the time being.
IIT Guwahati stepped a notch higher to provide life-saving equipment to Hospitals in Assam as well as Gauhati Medical College. These special equipment include 2 real-time polymerase chain reaction machines which are used to analyse DNA samples to diagnose COVID-19. These machines have the capacity of analysing 2,000 samples in a mere matter of 24 hours.
The institute has also been working on creating hand-held temperature measuring units, ventilators, ICU beds, disposal for medical waste (for isolation wards), hand sanitizer, disinfection showers and preventive masks.
Addressing the need of the hour - Ventilators
To deal with the availability of few ventilators which are mostly being used to cure critically ill patients, the director of IIT-Hyderabad has suggested the use of “bag valve masks”. These being self-inflatable devices which are used to deliver support for breathing in situations of emergency can be used as inexpensive, easy-to-make alternatives. In comparison to the cost of one ventilator which stands at INR 40 lakhs, one bag valve mask costs merely 5,000 rupees.
But because this device is hand-held, it cannot be used for long periods of time and is not a permanent replacement for ventilators. Thus, another idea shared by professors of IIT-Hyderabad is to design a device that can be electrically powered, the source for which can either be a car battery or conventional power supply. In addition to eliminating the need of a power supply, this portable device would be inexpensive to be manufactured in bulk and will easily be used in areas that lack power supply.
Stepping up to stop the spread
Apart from ways to deal with the current situation, researchers of IIT Kanpur and Guwahati have been working on building vaccines.
In fact, the Biosciences department of IIT Kanpur revealed that they have successfully been able to isolate the RNA extract of the novel Coronavirus and are in the process of receiving a similar extract from IIT Indore. If everything goes according to plan, the researchers at these institutes will come up with a vaccine in a couple of months which will then be sent for clinical trials.
Hand Sanitizers
Also, as sanitizers run out of stock, these institutions are rapidly making their own. Following the steps of IIT Delhi which made in-house alcohol-based hand-sanitizers, IIT Roorkee manufactured 150 litres of herbal hand-sanitizer and is now distributing the same to everybody on campus for free. The IITs of Kharagpur, Hyderabad, Ropar and Madras have also started producing their own sanitizers to fight Coronavirus.
To spread awareness of the disease, students at IIT Bombay have developed an app - Corontine. Based on geo-fencing, it alerts the authorities via text messages and emails in case a virus carrier breaks rules and moves out of the designated area - quarantine zone. It also sends a notification to authorities if a particular device transmits the same coordinates for a long period of time so that the person’s whereabouts can be checked upon.
On similar lines, the students of IIT-Ropar in alliance with other engineers built an app that warns users against the confirmed or suspected cases of COVID-19. The app triggers a warning for cases that are in vicinity, within the range of two or three feet, only if the other person has installed the app too.
The country is at war and these brave hearts of various IITs and other technical institutes have proven their worth in these tough times by putting up a fight against Coronavirus. As we all sit in our respective homes and pray for this calamity to come to an end, let us all laud the researchers, students, professors and everybody else who is doing their level best to make sure we come out of this phase safe and victorious.