Engineering students of Sona College of Technology, Salem, and engineers of Vee Technologies, Bengaluru, a business process management company, have developed ‘Corona-Scan’ and ‘Corona-Support’ apps in response to the Covid-19 crisis.
The first of these, ‘Corona-Scan’ pro-actively allows public health officials to map individuals who are in close proximity with a possibly infected or active Corona Virus patient, says a press release from Sona.
The second, a corresponding user app, ‘Corona-Support’ asks the public for their voluntary registration. If an individual tests positive, a voluntary status update can be entered in the app, helping health authorities and experts tracking the spread of the virus get accurate information.
The ‘Corona-Support’ app is intended to be of immense value to anyone wishing to protect the community from further spread.
“The third-year engineering students of Sona College of Technology — Bernotsha, Aravind Kumar and Naveen Kumar — under the guidance of Prof Akilandeswari J and the engineering team of Vee Technologies, have developed the app pair ‘Corona-Scan’ and ‘Corona-Support’. This will go a long way to contain spread of Covid-19,” said Chocko Valliappa, CEO, Vee Technologies, who thought of the idea.
By tracking and recording people within three to five metres every two minutes, the ‘Corona-Scan’ app generates live data of people in close proximity to one another. By mapping people who may have been infected and risk infecting others, public health officials can identify and take appropriate action to connect with them over the phone and keep them under observation, isolation or recommend testing. The ‘Corona-Scan’ app identifies how many times an individual has been in close proximity to the infected person in the designated period, explains Valliappa.
Inviting government and society to help adoption of these apps Valliappa said, “The success of the two apps lies in rapidly growing the number of users voluntarily. More the number of users the better the chances of breaking the chain of community spread. We invite organisations willing to associate with us in taking this message forward and adoption of this app.”
While the ‘Corona-Scan’ app will be available to public health officials, the ‘Corona-Support’ app,which can soon be downloaded from Play Store, can run on any smartphone active on a mobile data network. The simple registration only seeks the name and phone number of the individual who voluntarily downloads the app, explains Valliappa. Sona has submitted the development of these apps to the national innovation challenge.
