Three Manipal students win MIT’s COVID-19 hackathon

They teamed up with professionals from across the world

08/04/2020, GANESH PRABHU ,MANIPAL

Winners all: (From left) Adri Rajaraman, Akshatha Kamath and Shubham Rateria. Special Arrangement

A team of three students from Manipal Institute of Technology, which linked up with three professionals has won the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) COVID-19 Challenge event.

The team was declared as winner of its track — ‘Who to test and when?’ under ‘How to protect vulnerable populations from the effects of COVID-19?’ There were a total of ten tracks.

The ‘Beat the Pandemic’ was a 48-hour virtual event to help tackle the most critical needs caused by COVID-19. The hackathon started at 3.30 a.m. on April 4, where participants formed teams to shortlist the problems and find solutions.

The three students of Manipal Institute of Technology — Akshatha Kamath (third year CSE), Shubham Rateria (CCE Batch of 2019) and Adri Rajaraman (ECE Batch of 2019) — participated in the event.

They teamed up with Melia Watson, Washington DC (respiratory therapist, MBA), Hsiang Wei Hu, Taiwan (co-founder of Acusense Biomed), and Mariane Melo, U.K. (M.D.).

They narrowed down to the problem of overcrowded hospitals with inappropriate admissions, whereas less than 5% of the population under 50 years needs hospitalisation.

Tele-health platform

Their solution was to build a tele-health platform for non-contact monitoring of vital signs such as heart rate, respiratory rate and blood oxygen concentration using a phone camera or webcam at home.

“This cross-platform application avoids reliance on contact-based pulse oximeters,” Ms. Kamath told The Hindu. “This can be further developed into a telemedicine platform, wherein doctors can remotely identify the progress of the patients. This is useful in prevention of transfer of COVID-19 to healthcare professionals,” Mohammad Zuber, Assistant Director (Innovations), Manipal Institute of Technology, said.