Hindustan Times ST (Jaipur) - Hindustan Times (Jaipur) - City
App by students — a hit with plasma donors
Though there has been no breakthrough in making a vaccine for Covid-19 yet, youngsters haven’t stepped back from backing India’s brave fight against the pandemic. Two students of Iitdelhi, Tushar Chaudhary and Kaashika Prajaapat have collaborated with a doctor at All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Delhi, and an engineering student at a Delhi college to develop the COPAL-19 app, which builds a plasma bank to speed up recovery of patients.
Prajaapat, a fourth year Computer Science and Engineering undergraduate at IIT-D, says, “My friend, Tanay Aggarwal, an engineering student at a Delhi college, and I had been working on a Medical Facility Tracker that could help people locate things like the nearest hospital for treatment against Covid-19, the number of beds available in that hospital etc. When we launched it, a lot of people came to us to discuss what other problems could be solved though mobile apps. And one of the issues we found pertinent was the lack of routing between plasma donors and patients. We started working on a prototype. And Tushar, who is my senior at IIT-D, connected us with Dr Abhinav Singh Verma from AIIMS who was also aiming at solving the same problem.”
The developers are also in talks with the Karnataka government to further spread the word about the app.
In absence of a Covid-19 vaccine, the age-old plasma therapy is proving useful to reduce the viral load, making the app a crucial software. Dr Verma says, “We wanted plasma for one of our senior doctors who had tested positive for Covid-19, and it took a group of 50 doctors to arrange it. And yet, they managed to find only two donors. At that point I realised what a crisis it is.”
Hence, these Iitians acted quickly. “It took a week from ideation to prototyping. We worked day and night to get the permissions and to have a working prototype launched. It will now be made available pan India, on the playstore, within a week or two,” says Prajaapat.
Talk about the response so far and Prajaapat adds, “Even though it’s not a published app, people have already registered themselves as donors and have voluntarily come forward to save people who are infected and are in need of plasma.”