Campus RAKSHAK to check coronavirus

Two years into the making, top researchers of some of India’s premier institutes led by the IITJodhpur have created a system to prevent the possible spread of Covid-19 and ensure the smooth reopening of educational campuses.

‘Campus RAKSHAK’ has been launched just as students have begun to return to campuses, and states begin to ease restrictions on the number of employees allowed to attend physical office, etc. Two prototypes of Campus RAKSHAK have presently been deployed at IIT-Jodhpur and IIIT-Hyderabad, even as the development team is in talks to devise an affordable and flexible pricing model, product, marketing, and sales strategy to reach out to other residential campuses across the country.

Manas Bairagi, Chief Technological Officer, iHub Drishti, says that Campus RAKSHAK is the culmination of a lot of work that began in 2020 involving senior researchers, start-ups, etc. with the idea of creating a safety network in residential educational campuses that take a hit the moment there is a surge in Covid -19 cases. “The question before the researchers was how technology can help these campus populations to come onto the campus so that the students can attend physical classes,” he explains.

In creating the framework for the safe reopening of campuses, researchers build Campus RAKSHAK based on four components: Tapestry Pooling, Go Corona Go app, Simulators, and Healthbadge. These form a single platform that monitor, predict, and recommend mitigation strategies for campuses against Covid-19.

The Go Corona Go is an App that builds a primary, secondary, and tertiary contact graph of students. The mobile app is similar to Aarogya Setu, but the data is accessible to the administration for making the right decisions to prevent the spread of coronavirus. Its primary purpose is to conduct contact tracing. Users will remain connected to the campus server through the Bluetooth of their smartphones.

“When a student tests positive, with their permission these graphs are studied. It aids the campus administrators in taking an informed decision rather than keeping a large section of the student population in isolation,” Bairagi says. Similarly, the tapestry pooling method assigns individual samples to multiple pools, reducing the cost of screening to one-fourth. Based on the results of each pool, the algorithm predicts Covid-19 positive samples.

The simulators form the third component of Campus RAKSHAK. Bairagi explained that the simulators are made up of three simulation models called the Campus Modeler, CampusSim, and EpiSimmer. “The simulator will be able to predict where the Covid-19 positivity will spread in the coming days. This can be considered an advisory system to help the administration make decisions,” he reveals. Likewise, the last of the four components is the ‘Healthbadge,’ information management, and badging system. It categorizes students on the basis of the seriousness of the infection and issues red, orange, and green badges to them when the coronavirus infection is investigated.

“At both home ground, IIT-Jodhpur and IIIT-Hyderabad, the integrated information management system and dashboards are helping administrators keep track of the screening and vaccination status of the entire population at campuses and prevent possible disease spread. The results of both campuses have been encouraging,” says Bairagi whose team is also in talks with a jute processing company in Rajasthan to deploy the technology for its employees.

The consortium-based project saw IITJodhpur collaborate with IISc Bangalore, IIT-Kharagpur, IIIT-Hyderabad, IITBombay, Algorithmic Biologics Pvt Ltd, HeathBadge Private Limited, and Prthvi. AI to build, integrate and test to ensure safety on campuses through this initiative. IIT-Jodhpur director, Professor Santanu Chaudhury , Professor Partha Pratim Chakraborty, former director, IITKharagpur, Nandan Mishra, founder-CEO, algo8 AI, Dr. Anurag Agarwal, director, Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, Professor Vijay Chandru, IISC, Umakant Soni, CEO, Alfoundry and Professor P J Narayanan, director IIIT-Hyderabad were members of the projects co-ordination committee.

The researchers, Bairagi says, believe that the entire platform or any of the four components individually can be deployed in non-educational settings like factory premises, gated communities, etc. based on their requirement. “In the future, users will be able to rely on the RAKSHAK solutions with indigenous innovations in screening and pooling strategies at affordable costs. Using its machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies, future epidemics can be controlled and public health interventions evaluated across the nation and the world,” Bairagi reveals.

The iHuB Drishti team is charging Rs. 250 per user from the institutions opting for the programme, while also working on a flexible pricing mechanism while also exploring a subscription-driven model, as the numbers grow.

(This was first published in National Herald on Sunday)