How some technology companies turned Covid into an opportunity

When Pradeep V and Sudhakar founded Trackerwave in June 2018, their focus was on real-time location services (RTLS) for hospitals. Their product was a combination of gateways and sensors which would help hospitals keep track of various objects of interest – from movement of staff down to the level of fluid in intravenous drip containers. “We have gateways, which are transmitters of information, and sensors, which receive the information,” says Pradeep. Trackerwave had their first sale in December 2018 to Apollo Hospitals, and added six more hospitals to their customer list by the end of 2019.Then the pandemic came.“Our suppliers were affected by the shutdown in China,” says Sudhakar. But the supplier problem meant that there was a new market in the making. The technology underlying their product could be repurposed to manage social distancing and contact tracing within discrete environments. “We designed an ID card holder with built in tech that senses if another person wearing an ID card is within a configurable distance. So, if someone gets too close, the card holder beeps. The beeping can be shut off by a button in the holder, but the information about the people who were in proximity is uploaded to a database, as well as the duration that they were in close proximity,” says Pradeep. Trackerwave has just made its first sale of its proximity warning system, he says. “While the focus is on manufacturing units and large factories, we are also looking at making this system available over the counter, so that people who run smaller units can effectively deploy this system themselves. The proximity and interaction data will be made available to them through a software-as-a-service (SAAS) model,” he says. medium nocaption77521070While the main front of the battle against Covid is taking place in laboratories around the world, from Oxford and Columbia to CSIR here, an ecosystem for Covid related technology has sprung up over the past few months, and companies – especially those already in medtech (medical techonology) or IoT (Internet of things) – are looking at ways they can get a foothold in this market.It was similar for Sankara Srinivasan. After his previous company, RealtyCompass, was acquired by Quikr, Srinivasan and his co-founders at Wesense, Alok Mishra, Soumya Mohapatra and Debesh Kuanr, decided to focus on customer intelligence in retail spaces using closed circuit cameras as tools for data gathering. And when the lockdown came, the Wesense team got together to brainstorm about ways to deal with the retail downturn. They set themselves a target. The product should be available within a week – which meant that drastic redesign, or building from scratch was out of the question. They decided to leverage their strengths in CCTV technology to develop Clear Health, a wall-mounted product with a camera with the ability to check body temperature, a sensor-based automatic sanitiser dispenser, a processing unit for video analytics, including face recognition and mask detection, supported by a dashboard with alerts and notifications. The company has since tied up with MedikaBazaar, an online healthcare platform, as their local channel partner. medium nocaption77523092The team at Invento Robotics had deployed their Mitra robot at banks and IT companies. “We built robots for customer interactions, to increase customer engagement,” says Kaundinya Panyam, vice president, sales, at Invento Robotics. Invento, founded by Microsoft alumnus and serial entrepreneur Balaji Viswanathan, realised that a lot of interactions during a pandemic would require a series of structured interactions with minimal human contact. They quickly launched a screening variant of their Mitra robot, which would use thermal cameras on people entering semi-public spaces like airports and hospitals, and set up video conferences with doctors based on temperature and other data. Their Astra robot was tooled to perform UV sterilisation in vulnerable spaces. And a third variant, Robodoc, now works as a smart assistant for doctors and nurses, performing visits to quarantine wards to get patient information. “Our robots are capable of autonomous movement, and integration with existing software systems, both of which are key at this time,” says Panyam. medium nocaption77521104Raybaby is a radio-wave based breathing monitor for babies. When the pandemic struck, RIoT Solutions, the makers of Raybaby, thought they could repurpose it for Covid-19 patients. “One of the indicators used to monitor Covid patients is the respiratory rate. A normal human being, at rest, takes between 11 to 21 breaths a minute. For Covid patients, it is 24 or more,” says Aardra Kannan Ambili, co-founder of RIoT. And since their technology is radio-wave based, it can monitor patients from a safe distance, Ambili says. medium nocaption77521114At Coeo Labs, Nitesh Jangir and Nachiket Deval saw the potential Saans, their neonatal Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) device, had when it came to helping Covid patients on ventilator support. This, in conjunction with their VAPCare product, an oral hygiene management system, automates the process of saliva and secretion removal from patients on ventilators. “Ventilator patients produce a lot of saliva, which can neither be swallowed or spit out, and this saliva is highly infectious. Our product removes human intervention and automates the removal of this saliva,” says Jangir. medium nocaption77521448For most of the world, Covid is a disaster. But for tech companies that have been quick to adapt, Rockefeller’s maxim of turning disasters into opportunities, is turning out sound advice.Untitled Carousel 76972533