BEL-AIIMS to develop remote health monitoring system for coronavirus cases

Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) has partnered with the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) at Rishikesh to develop a state-of-the-art health monitoring system to remotely assess the health of COVID-19 patients quarantined in homes and hospitals.

In a statement, BEL said that this solution aims to significantly reduce the risk of exposure faced by healthcare workers. “It is also expected to reduce the increasing demand of Personal Protection Equipment and other logistics,” the company said.

Based on inputs by AIIMS, BEL said that it has developed a proof-of-concept model of a system integrating non-invasive health monitoring sensors to measure “critical parameters such as Temperature, Pulse Rate, SPO2 (Saturated Oxygen level) and Respiration Rate.”

Bharat Electronics said it was capitalizing on its expertise in Network Centric and Internet of Things (IoT) systems to network these sensors to remotely monitor the critical parameters such as temperature, Pulse Rate, SPO2 (Saturated Oxygen level) and Respiration Rate.

Meantime, AIIMS said that it had developed a mobile app and a web browser in order for people to enroll with the Institute if they show symptoms of COVID-19.

The Institute said that it will study patient complaints and based on the assessment by clinical experts, hand over a health monitoring kit to patients for periodical monitoring of the critical parameters.

Patient health parameters, along with their locations, will be uploaded regularly to a centralised Command and Control Centre (CCC) on Cloud using either the patient’s mobile phone or an integral GSM SIM.

“The use of Cloud will facilitate seamless scaling of the database of COVID-19 suspected or positive cases,” BEL said.

The software is also designed to issue alerts in the form of messages to medical officers and healthcare workers when the health parameters exceed the threshold. It will also record the severity of the patient’s condition in different colour codes.

Data analytics software of the CCC will also graphically map the geo-distribution of COVID-19 suspected and positive cases in the state.

“This will help hospital administration in visualising hotspots and taking necessary action to isolate and cordon off areas to check the spread of the virus,” BEL said.