Hyderabad: TITA inks pact with DRDO

SAMPARC created by DRDO is a software tool that can be a handy tool for law enforcement and health officials. This would enable intelligent automated tracking of those in quarantine or isolation. It will also generate alerts if there are violations or wilful suppression of movement details. This is expected to reduce the tracking workload of law enforcement or health officials

Hyderabad: Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and software professionals industry body Telangana Information Technology Association (TITA) have joined hands to implement an automated management of patient's software that the former has designed. The pilot for the implementation will likely begin shortly in any district. Both the organizations have entered into an agreement on this online.

DRDO has devised SAMPARC – Smart Automated Management of Patients and Risks for Covid-19, intelligent software for enforcement of quarantine or isolation. While breaking the chain is a must to contain the spread, there have been some cases of those in quarantine or isolation moving out in public. This leads to additional workload for law enforcement and health officials to continuously monitor these individuals who are in quarantine or isolation.

The SAMPARC created by DRDO is a software tool that can be a handy tool for law enforcement and health officials. This would enable intelligent automated tracking of those in quarantine or isolation. It will also generate alerts if there are violations or wilful suppression of movement details. This is expected to reduce the tracking workload of law enforcement or health officials.

The SAMPARC solution can be deployed as a National service by NIC, or can be distributed as a State-wise or region-wise service.

This can be used for quarantine or isolation monitoring only and not for contact tracing. It relies on the information provided by the police and health officials. It allows geo-fencing, face recognition, display of data on map (with hotspot information if available).

The rollout of the solution involves no cost to the patient and local authority needs to position only a suitable computer and the software is based on a combination of open source software and DRDO developed software, and therefore does not involve costs.

Details of the patient including name, cell phone number, IMEI of the phone, coordinates of the quarantine location, duration of quarantine, email-id and optionally photographs of the patient for AI based face detection.

The app has to be installed on the patient's smartphone which would automatically send a protected message to the Covid server every 10 minutes. The app would run as a background service that would automatically restart even if the phone reboots. Based on the requirements of the authorities, the patient will be able to send Selfies taken through the SAMPARC app to the server for automated AI based face recognition.

The software would automatically generate an alarm if the patient violates the geofence of his quarantine location in four consecutive inputs received from the smartphone. It also sends out an alert if the selfie does not match the photo taken during registration. The software would display potential violations as a red symbol. Once the quarantine period is over, the patient would be removed from tracking and they can uninstall the SAMPARC app.

The online pact was signed by Dr Rituraj Kumar, Scientist G, Center for AI & Robotics (CAIR) DRDO and Sundeep Kumar Makthala, Global President – TITA.

"We chose TITA as an implementing partner as it has been working at the grass root level and has implemented many programmes like digital literacy, rural citizens connect with doctors through Tconsult, etc." said Dr Rituraj.

"It is a matter of pride to be selected as an implementing partner for a solution devised by DRDO," said Makthala.

Sunil Chaugule, William Bhavane, TITA Corporate Secretary Ajase Hussain, GWC member Srikanth Uppala supported the project.