Developing countries with huge population like India is facing a very challenging situation in it's campaign against COVID-19 and i.e to contain the spread of virus especially in sub-urban areas.
This project will help enhance two steps taken by Indian government to ensure containment of virus:
#1 Essential quarantining covid positive patients and travellers for 14 days in government facilities:
Inside the quarantine centre a NRF52840 BLE based wearable device is given to each patient having necessary sensors like Heart Rate Monitor, Body Temperature and if possible a BLE based Pulse Oximeter, These sensors will measure the body vitals and send data over MQTT-SN to a central server deployed in the centre which is made using Balena Fin. Apart from the vitals the RSSI data will also be sent
At the server i.e the Balena Fin, a InfluxDB database will store all this data and Grafana will show all this data to dashboard to the staff member, this data will be use to monitor patients and later used for treatments based on data trends. If any device fails to send data in a particular time frame a Email/push notification based alert will be generated and sent to the staff.
NRF52840 Development board reading data from all the sensors and sending it to Balena Fin over BLE using MQTT-SN.
On the Balena fin data is stored in InfluxDB database and Displayed on Grafana Dashboard both running as docker container.
#2 Deploy touches sanitiser dispensers in all public places:
Government around the world has planned to install touch less sanatizers dispensers in public places, this project can make them smart by logging the data of how many times a day it has been used, what is current level of fluid inside and generating alerts if it needs refilling. Level will be measured using a level sensor connected to NRF52840 which will send data as many other dispensers in that area to a single balena fin gateway over BLE and MQTT-SN. To increase the range LoRa and LoRaWAN can be used instead, so many dispensers will need just one Balena Fin Gateway. If level goes below a certain threshold a refill alert will be send to the respective authorities taking care of it's maintenance in that area.
The government in collaboration with private sector has done a great job in creating quarantined centres for people who are likely to have contradicted the corona virus, these includes generally someone with a travel history in red zone or have been in contact with someone having the virus in near past.
But there are very big challenge in containing these folks, such as lack of infrastructure to track their vitals such as body temperature, blood oxygen monitor, pulse rate etc and log them, and even bigger challenge is to successfully contain them for the entire quarantine period.
There have been a lot of cases reported where the people have ran away from the centres and causing a panic around:
UP Authorities Face a Different Set of Challenge as Villagers Run Away from Quarantine FacilitiesCoronavirus: Why are people running away from quarantine in IndiaCoronavirus in India: Migrants running away from quarantinehttps://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-52276606
We all can agree that remaining in a lockdown is not easy, but necessary to ensure everyone's safety.
I believe with the current technology it is entirely possible to solve the above mentioned problems using a BLE based wearable solution and a central gateway :
Alerts can be generated if a radio disconnects the gateway, such as a phone call using NEXMO API or SMS which will alert care taking authorities to check for the personal.
All the devices can be managed from the cloud and the data obtained can be used for research and analysis of narrowing down the containment.
Challenges:
- Prototyping the idea without having all necessary sensors and infrastructure and not able to get it in lockdown.
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