A visit to hospital and witnessing the plight of paralytic patients, cancer patients, physically impaired patients triggered the students of Mechatronics engineering branch of Chandigarh University to develop an IoT (Internet of Things) based patient assistance system that can help the attendants to better understand the requirements of the patients.
A team of 4th year engineers comprising of Aman Gupta, Vivek Chauhan, Mayank Verma, Lalit Yadav and Ishan Nayak have come to rescue of such patients who are not capable of speaking or using any signs to describe their needs to their attendants such as old age persons with dementia, paralytic, physically disabled patients or last stage cancer patients.
The team has developed a gesture based sensor technology which can be attached to the patients’ hand to provide notifications to the attendants for certain requirements like it’s paining, want water or food, going to washroom etc.
The system has been designed with some pre-stored gestures (currently upto 4) along with IoT board, gesture sensors, power circuits, Wi-Fi nodules, LCD screen speaker for emergency and the system can also with attached to voice based online systems such as Alexa.
Currently costing about Rs 5000 the team is working onto decreasing the cost by developing the server based model where multiple devises can be attached.
While explaining the working of the system, Vivek Chauhan said, “One of the main task of the IoT Patient Assistant System is to keep monitoring all the factors that a patient may need to be taken care for like number of times a patient called for assistance and how many times no one attended them, storing the important statistics like heartbeat level, BP Level, blood sugar monitoring.”
Another feature of the system is that it comes integrated with an automatic water feeding system where water is slowly dripped into the patients mouth as soon it gets command from them, added Lalit Yadav.
“The idea came when we visited a hospital where I saw a paralytic patient who could not speak asking for water and there was no one to look after him,” said Mayunk.
It took 4-5 months to develop the system and test it in real time situation. The students have filed a patent for the system and will try to enhance its capability with times.
Chandigarh University has established Technology Business Incubator (TBI) at its campus where new generation entrepreneurs and researchers are trained so that they set-up their own ventures.
Till date more than 100 Start-ups have been established by the students of university which are successfully running and more than 400 patents have been filed by the research scholars and students that will help India in making it self-reliant in the technology field.
