Scientists world over have been making efforts to build technologies by mimicking insects and plants that can ‘pull water from thin air’ both figuratively and literally. Such water harvesting techniques use the concept of water-repelling nature or hydrophobic nature of some materials such as the lotus leaf. But this simple method is unsuitable for water harvesting from highly humid environments as the high moisture content can displace the trapped air and cause permanent damage.

The research team from the Chemistry Department and the Centre of Nanotechnology at IIT Guwahati has for the first time used the concept of chemically patterned slippery liquid-infused porous surface (SLIPS) to effectively harvest water from foggy or moist air. The team has taken inspiration from the nature of pitcher-plant which has a surface that makes insects landing on it to fall into its tube-shaped structure in order to digest it. They have produced a patterned hydrophilic SLIPS by spraying a sponge-like porous polymeric material on top of a simple A4 printer sheet. The team believes that the model inspired from pitcher plant is an inexpensive method of water harvesting from humid air. The team claims that their water harvester is highly efficient as their fog collecting rate is high and can be used in underwater hulls of ships and submarines to prevent bio-fouling and also to prevent icing on aircraft windows.The study has been published in the Journal of The Royal Society of Chemistry.

SOURCE: THE HINDU

New Delhi, June 30th (India Science Wire): The Principal Scientific Advisor (PSA) to the Government of India, Prof K. Vijay Raghavan launched ‘Grassroots Innovation Programme (GRIP)’ for students, an initiative by IIT Delhi under which the Institute students will work on finding novel solutions to grassroots societal problems identified by them from rural and semi-urban areas, including the communities they come from.  

Lauding the initiative launched by IIT Delhi, Prof K. Vijay Raghavan expressed hope that GRIP will result in the development of several innovative solutions for society.  

Activities proposed as a part of this new initiative includes Social Immersion, a programme in which group of students will visit communities located in smaller towns and villages to immerse in social environments for a substantial time (one week to months) to study, understand and identify local needs and challenges, which can be addressed by the students when they return to the Institute campus. 

“The immersion programme provides an opportunity for students to put themselves in the shoes of end-users and to co-create solutions which are likely to succeed. This programme also acts as a pipeline of ideas, which students and student teams can address as a part of semester-long design and innovation courses already available to them,” said Prof. PVM Rao, Head, Department of Design, IIT Delhi who is coordinating the initiative. 

Another component of the GRIP initiative includes Grassroots Innovation Programme in which students and student teams will be allowed to work on semester-long or year-long projects on finding novel solutions to grassroots problems identified by them. 

The needs/problems on which students are expected to work can be from one of the two routes: Students or student teams have identified the problem/need and validated it as a part of prior social immersion programme. Secondly, IIT Delhi student(s) who come from diverse regions of the country, identify problems/challenges being faced in their local communities (in their villages, towns and semi-urban settings).

The GRIP initiative will provide physical, intellectual, and financial resources to the students to carry out these projects. To implement the above programmes, existing courses and schemes of the Institute will be leveraged. In this way students will have an opportunity to earn academic credits for their efforts. The programme can synergize with other programmes of the Institute, which include UBA, RUTAG, NSS, ENACTUS, etc.

“There are many students who have shown interest in addressing the unmet needs in their own neighbourhoods. Further, students are enthusiastic to participate in proposing and validating novel solutions that respond to the local situation and the interests and values of the communities involved. The GRIP initiative is aimed at providing resources to the students who want to help the society by solving its problems,” said Prof V. Ramgopal Rao, Director, IIT Delhi.    

IIT Delhi and Honey Bee Network (HBN), a volunteer based network that seeks innovative ideas and traditional knowledge produced at the grassroots level by individuals and communities and disseminates them to the wider ecosystem, have joined hands to groom students as torchbearers of social and grassroots innovation through GRIP programme. 

Prof. Anil K. Gupta, Coordinator of Honey Bee Network said, “For the GRIP initiative, the Honey Bee Network will act as one of the facilitators to connect IIT Delhi students and faculty with local communities and environments.” 

He further said that the social immersion and shodh-yatras will give an opportunity for students to learn from grassroots innovators and also to add value to their efforts. Students who do immersion in earlier years will have additional opportunity to address some of the needs identified by them as their course projects. (India Science Wire) ISW/USM/IITD/ENG/30/06/2021

Sanguina, an Atlanta-based health technology developer has recently launched a smartphone application named ‘ANEMOCHECK’for the non-invasive detection of anaemia by using pictures of fingernails  of a person to detect an iron deficiency in him or her. Instead of a blood test, simply the picture of one’s fingernails can determine whether the level of haemoglobin in their blood is low or not. 

Presently all other anaemia detection tools require external equipment and are invasive in approach. Researchers studied fingernail photos and correlated the color of the fingernail beds with haemoglobin levels measured by conducting complete blood count in 337 people which included some healthy people and some diagnosed with different types of anaemia. The algorithm to convert fingernail colour to blood haemoglobin level was developed by using the data from 237 of these subjects and then tested on 100. The researchers could display that a single smartphone image can measure haemoglobin levels with an accuracy of 2.4 grams/decilitre with sensitivity of upto 97% it also showed that personalised calibration which was done on four patients over a period of several weeks could improve the accuracy to 0.92 grams/decilitre.

The device could prove to be very beneficial for various sections of people like pregnant women, women with abnormal menstrual bleeding or athletes and people with bleeding disorders as this can be used by anyone at any time. Patients suffering from chronic anaemia can facilitate their self-management by monitoring their disease and identifying the times when they need to adjust their therapies or receive transfusions. This may reduce the complications associated with patients having late or early transfusions.

SOURCE: WWW.WEBMD.COM

A team from Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore has successfully developed a portable device which produces high resolution 3D images of human skin within 10 minutes.  The device presses a specially devised film onto the person’s skin to get an imprint of upto 5 by 5 centimetres, which later is subjected to electric current in order to produce the 3D image. A biodegradable bioplastic  known as polylactic acid (PLA) has been used by the team to design and 3D print a prototype of their device which is battery operated and measures 7 by 10cm weighing only 100 grams. PEDOT PSS, a polymer is the main component used in the device for its electrical conductivity which reproduced skin patterns on gold-coated film.

To use it, a person pushes a button to press the gold-coated film onto the subject’s skin to get an imprint. This causes sebum which gets transferred onto the film, creating an imprint of the skin surface. Then the skin’s imprint is transferred to the portable device where a set of electrodes is immersed in a solution. Then another push of the button is made to trigger a flow of electric charge causing PEDOT PSS to be deposited on the surfaces of the gold-coated film in areas that are not covered with sebum. This finally produces a high-resolution 3Dmap of the skin which also reflects the ridges and grooves of the skin upto 2mm.

This portable skin mapping device can also be used to assess the severity of skin conditions such as eczema and psoriasis and would prove very useful to clinicians as presently most of the equipments being used give only 2D images of the skin surface.

Low production cost, non-invasive approach, simpilicity of operation and low weight of about 100 grams is the USP of this device as against similar products in the market which cost thousands of dollars and weigh upto 30 kilograms. The device could be used to enhance the current methods of diagnosing and treating skin diseases and also be a useful method to map skin texture and wound healing in a 3Dmanner as presently there is no tool that maps the depth and length of skin ridges. Owing to its small size, weight and use of a 1.5V dry battery, the portable device can become a tool of choice in giving point of care assessment in clinical settings.

The researchers used pig skin as a model to demonstrate that the technology was able to map different kinds of wounds such as abrasions, lacerations, incisions and punctures and also showed that even complex wrinkles on the back of a human hand could be captured on the film. The device may also help in fingerprint identification, commonly performed in forensic analysis. To further validate the efficacy of the device, the team is likely to carry out clinical trials in second half of the year. The study is published in the scientific journal Analytica Chimica Acta.

SOURCE: WWW.INSHORTS.IN

To contain positive covid cases efficiently it is important to have effective home management of such cases. In light of this viewpoint, IIT Mandi researchers have developed first- of- its- kind, an AI-driven home quarantine management application named “lakshmanarekha” for covid patients.

The app uses a combination of geofencing, biometric verification and artificial intelligence in order to continuously monitor and accurately detect the identity of a home quarantined person. The uniqueness of this app lies in the fact that it can also serve as an unbreachable mobile phone platform for non-covid mobile users and situations like national emergency or curfew for identifying lawbreakers and violators.  Presently the pilot version of the app has been developed and tested over small datasets. The results obtained so far are very good and now the team is working to add more scalability, functionality and usability of the app to make it ready for deployment.

The quarantine management mobile applications which are presently being used enforce the self-isolated individuals to share their instantaneous position routinely via geofencing technology or are required to upload their face selfie on hourly basis or ten times a day. The drawback here is that these apps fail to ensure the identity of the user throughout the time because individuals can leave their mobile devices in isolation zones and move in or out causing disobedience of the self-isolation rules. Similarly an hourly reporting of selfie is also not full proof of self-isolation as the user can try to fool the system by simply using a photo containing its registered face. Lakshmanarekha has been developed to overcome the shortcomings of the existing mobile applications in this area of quarantine by matching the quarantine location of the individual with the location from where they have uploaded their biometric data and also by using AI, the application continuously computes an authentication score which can measure how certain it is that the quarantines user is also the one using the mobile device. If any action indicates that the user identity has been changed then the application detects it and reports it to the authorities for necessary action.

It is very important to track the movements of every individual who is infected with COVID-19 in order to control the rapid spread of the pandemic. The research work has been published in the IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine.

SOURCE: WWW.INDIATODAY.IN

In today’s time where there are limited testing facilities it has become imperative to innovate  and create fast and reliable testing techniques so that large number of population can be catered effectively. Keeping this issue in mind, researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar have developed an Artificial Intelligence (AI) based deep learning tool for detection of COVID-19 cases from chest x-ray images. This online tool indicates the probability if a person is infected with COVID-19 and thus can be used for quick preliminary diagnosis before the confirmatory medical test is done. The result comes out within seconds of feeding the input x-ray image for analysis.

To carry out the research, the team pooled the data of x-ray images of patients infected with COVID-19 and healthy persons from different sources available on the internet and then trained a machine learning architecture by using deep learning algorithms with these images. The format of any test image of a new person will automatically be transformed and diagnosed using the AI tool. This deep learning model used by the team has 12 layers of neural network that is similar to neurons present in the human brain. The newly developed tool also use images from other lung infections like pneumonia and tuberculosis to ensure the specificity of detection of COVID-19 from other diseases of the lung.

The positives of this new AI tool lies in the facts that it learns the disease diagnosing features from the x-ray images in an automatic way and also it uses simple machine learning architecture that makes it stand out over other such high-tech tools available globally. The team believes that in order to develop a reliable tool , one must use the right combination of algorithms and data. Presently this tool is only indicative and it is necessary to have a clinical consultation to confirm the diagnosis. The aim here is to reduce the burden on medical infrastructure by aiding testing and diagnosis with preliminary results. The IIT team is collaborating with Indian Institute of Public Health (IIPH), Gandhinagar to further test the AI-based tool so that it can soon be made available for wider use.

SOURCE: INDIA TODAY

Today fast testing and detection of COVID-19 is of prime importance in tackling the epidemic world over. Contributing to this vision, researchers at KJ Hospital Research and Postgraduate Centre, Chennai, India have developed a human palm-sized device that they claim can detect COVID-19 infection in a few seconds as against the presently used RT-PCR test which takes six hours to give results. The technology behind the device is based on measurement of a very small quantity of electricity which human body generates. In a normal person the range is from 23-25 milliVolt whereas the research findings show that in a person infected with COVID-19 it ranges between 5-15 milliVolt.Parameters taken into consideration by the device are blood pressure, oxygen saturation, Zeta potential, body temperature and blood count of the user. Other than blood pressure and fever, the sensors can also detect low count of WBCs, RBCs and platelets and low blood oxygen saturation.

The USP of this device is that it is non-invasive and does not need any prick. All a user has to do is place his/her hand in a plastic glove on the device to prevent infection and results flash on the connected computer within seconds. The team verified the results of their device with the RT-PCR results of hundreds of patients who were coming into the Stanley and Omandurar Hospitals in Chennai which happened to be a 100% match with the results of RT-PCR  and almost 98% match when it was compared to the standard blood count test.

The cost incurred by the research team on producing this device is INR 10,000 but they are hopeful that it can be produced for a lesser amount by their manufacturing partners. The team has already filed for patent of their device.

SOURCE: WWW.DNAINDIA.COM

The COVID-19 attack is hard-hitting a nation like India with a huge population thereby posing a challenge of oxygen shortage in many areas. To address this very concern, the Indian Navy has started an ‘oxygen on wheels’ plant which has been designed by the Naval Dockyard, Vishakhapatnam and was recently launched in the month of May 2021. A team of specialists from the Vishakhapatnam, Naval Dockyard have come together to connect the oxygen pipeline in the Covid health centre at Palasa. This is a unique model wherein a PSA Oxygen plant was integrated on a mobile platform with the aim to help serve remote hospitals. This step will ensure oxygen supply round the clock and 12 patients can use it at one time. The staff posted at the oxygen plant has also been trained by the Naval team.

Oxygen Recycling System (ORS) has specially been conceptualised and designed  by the Diving School of Southern Naval Command to remove and efficiently handle the existing oxygen shortages. The credit of designing the ORS goes to Lt Commander Mayank Sharma of Diving School. The idea of its design came from the basic concept which is currently used in some of the diving sets used by the school. When a patient inhales oxygen, only a small percentage of it is actually absorbed by the lungs and the rest is exhaled along with the carbon-dioxide produced by the body. As per the Indian Navy, this exhaled oxygen can be reused once the exhaled carbon-dioxide is removed from it. This is possible by using the ORS which adds second pipe to the oxygen mask which is already being used by the patient.

By using a low-pressure motor and non-return valves, this second pipe then sucks out the air exhaled by the patient which is then fed into a Bacterial Viral Filter for the Heat and Moisture Exchange Filter (BVF-HME Filter) to absorb any viral contaminants. After this, the gases pass through a high-grade CO2 scrubber with a High-Efficiency Particulate Air (HEPA) filter to absorb CO2 and other particulates allowing and facilitating the enriched oxygen to pass through unaffected, which then is pumped back into the inhalation pipe of the face mask of the patient.

Thus this system will help in reducing the use of oxygen from the cylinder and aid in extending the life of the existing medical oxygen cylinders two to four times. The ORS prototype cost is capped at INR 10,000 and is expected to help save around Rs 3000 daily due to the recycling of oxygen. The specialists at Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology (SCTIMST), Thiruvananthapuram have given a go-ahead to both the design and feasibility of the concept by giving an Initial Evaluation Certificate to the prototype. So this ORS is going in for clinical trials and soon will be available for mass production.

SOURCE: WWW.DNAINDIA.COM