App Developed In Pune To Help Monitor The Spread COVID19 Contagion

Dimakh
Share this News:

Project is being managed under the aegis of Ministry of AYUSH and Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR)

Pune, September 21, 2020: With a focus to monitor and restrict the spread the COVID 19 contagion, a mobile app called COVID KAVACH has been instituted in Pune under the aegis of Ministry of AYUSH and Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). The app was designed and developed by Dimakh Consultants for which it was selected as the winner of ‘Engineering Excellence Award’ at the Global India Business Forum (GIBF) recently.

The app, which is in use in the ongoing AYUSH CSIR COVID drug trial studies was conceptualized by Dr Arvind Chopra, Director, Center for Rheumatic Diseases (CRD) Pune and his team in response to the requirement of the AYUSH COVID 19 research projects for Ayurvedic medicines in COVID-19 and to track the daily symptoms and provide real-time data on the clinical trial status of COVID-19 participants. The designing and development of the app was completed in about six weeks by Dimakh Sahasrabuddhe, Chairman and CEO of Dimakh Consultants and associates who are well-known IT experts.

The main objective of the app is to track study participants on a daily basis to know whether the person has any symptom suggestive of COVID-19 or a drug side effect. It has 7 core questions to address this in a friendly format and permits daily contact between the study participant and study investigator.

“COVID KAVACH app should be considered as a contribution towards India’s combat with COVID-19. This app can be used in the community for surveillance of COVID-19, which will improve compliance to study medication and lead to early diagnosis and any necessary treatment. Importantly, the participant will only be identified by a unique code and no other personal details will be captured by the program thus ensuring total confidentiality. The app is suitably designed to extract analytics of study participant flow and participation,” said Dr Arvind Chopra.

Though the app has been developed for an Ayurvedic research project, it can be effectively used in any clinical research project concerning COVID-19 or even in any kind of lung or airways infections.

According to Dimakh Sahasrabuddhe, it was the challenge for the team to fulfil all the needs of the doctors and the medical staff and to make an app which was user friendly and intuitive for the participants to use and implement.

“Unlike other apps, the most important aspect of the COVID KAVACH is to ensure 100 percent privacy of each participant as the communication is done only between the patient and the doctor on a personal level. We have now entered the Phase 2 trial of the app where the predictive analysis will be done with the help of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to trigger alerts,” said Sahasrabuddhe.