Two start-ups incubated at the NASSCOM Centre of Excellence IoT & AI, an initiative of the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY) & NASSCOM are supporting ongoing efforts to curb the spread of COVID19. DronaMaps is working with Haryana and Punjab Government, while BlinkIn is providing services to Wuhan Hospital in China.
Ajai Kumar Garg, Senior Director, Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY), “We are happy to see the excellent job being done by NASSCOM CoE incubated start-ups. They are working in line with the Government to tackle the pandemic. When these young startups help fight a pandemic by using the latest technologies, we realize that the efforts of NASSCOMCoE towards Digital India are moving in the right direction. I would like to congratulate the team of DronaMaps and BlinkIn for their products that are helping in tracking the cases.”
Sophisticated tracking and communication tools are helping in executing a response, Utkarsh Singh, co-founder of DronaMaps, which is incubated at NASSCOM CoE, Gurugram, said, “At DronaMaps, we hold expertise in drone-based mapping and AI analytics.
Looking at the capabilities of the solution developed by DronaMaps, Shri Ankur Gupta, IAS, Principal Secretary DITECH, Haryanarecommended them to the Health Department, Haryana and connected them with ACS Health& concerned officials. “The infrastructure in Haryana was already very mature, with multiple groups of servers which were handling all GIS requirements of the state. We immediately published the public dashboards, and is now working toward making the admin dashboards live by Monday (March 30, 2020),” said Utkarsh.
Utkarsh also said that we were in Punjab when the state was designing its policy to tackle the spread of Coronavirus with one positive case already present in Amritsar. We volunteered to contribute to their efforts by providing a reliable dashboard that sourced data released by official sources like the Ministry of Health and Family Affairs to monitor the situation.”
There are two parts to DronaMaps COVID-19 tracking Initiative. First, a user-facing public dashboard that is built to provide reliable information pooled from official sources for citizens at large. The second is an administrative dashboard with more advanced features like location tracking, geofencing, and predictive analytics. “To flatten the curve of the number of cases with the disease, it is important to track the positive cases, suspected cases, quarantined individuals, hospitalised cases, etc. To give an example, all suspected cases are constantly monitored through social media or VLR (call records). This ensures officials are aware of the places they could have visited and by detecting the mobile phones close to the patient’s phone, the people who have been in close physical proximity with the patient. In addition, predictive spatial analysis based on granular spatial and temporal data can be used to estimate which areas would need additional resources,” Utkarsh added.
Appreciating the efforts of these startups, Mr. Ajay Tomer, IAS, Addl. Secretary, DITECH, said, “Everyone has to come together to fight the Corona scare and technology is playing a major role in this.