televital

For the efficient management of this COVID situation, it is necessary to prioritize who needs care and who does not.

 Today, it’s very difficult to do this because there are a lot of patients and not enough doctors. And this leads to overcrowding of hospitals and clinics and brings about an imbalance in the healthcare system. Therefore, it is necessary to handle this situation by analyzing the health of the patient at their homes itself. It also prevents healthcare professionals from being directly exposed to the virus, which is a huge advantage. Because of the doctors and nurses get sick, then our first line of defense is lostSince the issue is with monitoring the patients at the hospital, we decided to do preliminary analysis on various parameters of their health right at the comfort of their homes. Therefore, we consulted a few medical professionals who are treating COVID patients and tried to understand the problem they currently face. After having a conversation with them, we felt vitals play a major role in determining if a patient needs hospitalization or not. The doctors recommended capturing vitals such as heart rate, respiratory rate, spo2 and body temperature without any contact-based measurement tools such as pulse oximeter as that would potentially increase the spread of contact-based infections/diseases.So, the final plan we made as a team was to capture vitals and body temperature and also try to check if the person is possibly at risk of being infected / a carrier. We also planned to make prescription contactless to that in no way will there be direct physical contact between the healthcare professionals and patients.Since mobiles/laptops are readily available at most of the homes, we decided to use this as a tool to capture vitals and calculate other parameters via a web browser and establish a communication between the patient and the doctor via the internet. We referred to a couple of research papers to monitor vitals via web camera to get started and ended up implemented a better algorithm than the existing ones out there.Initially, we had issues connecting the python script which we wrote with the web-browser and later we managed to run it locally. Post local deployment when we tried hosting it, we had issues in streaming data via the web browser. After multiple attempts, we successfully managed to implement all this in less than 60 hours.After the hackathon is over, we plan to do a clinical trial and improve the algorithm’s efficiency. After successfully clearing this phase we plan to provide this as a service to a chain of hospitals to remotely monitor the health of their patients.

 It’s not only for the momentary crisis but in the long term is definitely worth the efforts. We would look forward to integrating the patient prioritizer and the digital prescription with the hospital’s existing system to help the professionals determine whom to admit / not incase if there is a shortage of resources.

 We plan to integrate facilities for measurement of different parameters like height, weight, etc. [through augmented reality] so that the reach of this application goes beyond COVID.