Using these technologies, the researchers aim to train the health workers at the primary health cares (PHCs).
The training will begin from PHC health workers in Tamil Nadu under National Health Mission and will later be scaled to other states in India where neonatal health and maternal health is very high.
An IIT Madras team at the Centre of Excellence on Virtual Reality (VR) and Haptics, called Experiential Technology Innovation Center (XTIC), identified that skill training of the health workers was a major challenge that India was facing, specifically at the primary health centres in rural settings.
Infant Mortality is the biggest contributor is Neonatal Mortality Rate (NMR) which is death within 28 days of birth. Around 40 babies are lost per every 1,000 births.
"We want to bring this down to single digits and all these initiatives are towards this direction. We assure that these tools will now be provided to the healthcare workers in delivery points and we will also have special training points," said Dr Darez Ahamed IAS, Mission Director, National Health Mission Tamil Nadu, in a statement.
He requested IIT Madras to also develop tools to train healthcare workers in various other areas such as treating accident victims, among numerous others.
The team also launched a SmartFHR project to reduce Maternal Mortality Rate (MMR). It is aimed at monitoring foetal health using smartphones anywhere and anytime without clinical assistants.
This project also will be scaled subsequently to other states where MMR is very high.
Neonatal Health and Maternal health are crucial to increasing equity and reducing poverty in any country, which leads to solving large broader, economic, social and developmental challenges.
"We need to bring in technology that will be accessible to rural India and this technology is a step in that direction. This was one of the key learnings from Covid-19 Pandemic," said Prof. V. Kamakoti, Director, IIT Madras, in the statement.
"I am sure Virtual Reality will make an impact not only in healthcare verticals but in other areas as well," Kamakoti said.
Called Kadam, the prosthetic knee has advantages over a hinge joint because of the multiple axes of rotation, which provide the user greater control over the prosthesis while walking and maximum knee flexion of 160 degrees to make it easy to sit in cramped spaces like buses and autos.
It is designed for durability with high strength stainless steel and aluminium alloy along with hard chrome plated EN8 pins and high fatigue life polymer bushings.
Indigenously developed Kadam is affordable and at the same time, of high quality and performance, complying with ISO standards including 30 lakh cycles of fatigue testing.
It provides stability, reduces the risk of stumbling and its patented geometry is specifically optimised for use on uneven terrains.
"Functional needs, socioeconomic and environmental challenges of Indian users are unique. Kadam's user-centric design takes these into account. It meets international quality standards while being 4-5 times more affordable than comparable imported knees," said Prof Sujatha Srinivasan, Head, TTK Center for Rehabilitation Research and Device Development (R2D2), IIT Madras, in a statement.
A team at TTK Centre for Rehabilitation Research and Device Development (R2D2) at IIT Madras developed Kadamin association with Society for Biomedical Technology (SBMT) and Mobility India.
Through Mobility India, extensive clinical trials have been conducted in various geographical settings. The feedback has ensured that the design is user-centric and functional in different environments. Users instantly recognise the stable nature of the knee. The ability of the user to let go of the safety of parallel bars in the very first trial is a testimony to the performance of the knee.
It is also customisable stability adjustment depending on the user's need and provides frictional swing control adjustment for different walking speeds.
IIT Madras' TTK Centre had previously developed and commercialised Arise - the country's first standing wheelchair - and NeoFly-NeoBolt - active wheelchair and motorised add-on for seamless indoor-outdoor mobility.
This state-of-the-art Centre aims to become a world-renowned research centre, generating unprecedented human brain data, scientific output and technology tools.
IITM has been ranked No.1 in the 'Overall' Category for the third consecutive year in India Ranking 2021 released by National Institutional Ranking Framework, Ministry of Education, Govt. of India
IIT Madras plans to train hundreds of undergraduate and postgraduate students at this centre in neuro-science and computing, machine learning techniques on cutting-edge brain data.
According to a statement, the centre is supported by Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan and his wife Sudha Gopalakrishnan. Their dedicated efforts in seeding research at IIT Madras at the intersection of Neuroscience and Engineering are now powering this centre in the frontier research area of brain mapping.
Prof. K. Vijay Raghavan, Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India, said: "The combination of IIT Madras, which has the expertise in science and data analysis, with medicine is going to be revolutionary.
"Going forward, we have an extraordinary problem in Neuroscience, i.e. on the functioning of human brain. We are at an earlier stage in our understanding of the human brain functioning. The IIT Madras brain centre will help in solving complex issues that will benefit the world."
"The dynamic leadership of IIT Madras has shown the ability to herd different kinds of complex talent together. The IIT Madras Research Park is an example and today every institution wants to copy the model," he added.
Prof. V. Kamakoti, Director, IIT Madras, said: "The Brain Research Centre is a great case study which proves that technology can contribute to medicine and solve societal problems. The Centre will make deep in-roads in collecting data for brain research."
Mohanasankar Sivaprakasam, Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Madras, and Head of Sudha Gopalakrishnan Brain Centre said: "The technology platform we have developed and our strong medical collaborations, is allowing us to generate high-resolution large-format histology sections of human brains that will advance the field significantly."
The centre will also work on 3D digital neuro-anatomy of the postmortem human brain with cellular resolution. This is a field with great potential for scientific discovery and also for the understanding of neurological disorders.
The unique data sets being generated here promise to be widely impactful through open sharing with an international research community.
R-naught or R0 indicates the number of people an infected person can spread the disease to. A pandemic is considered to end if this value goes below 1.
Based on preliminary analysis by computational modeling done by IIT Madras, the R0 value was close to 2.9 nationally in the past week (December 25 to December 31). The number was recorded at 4 this week (January 1-6).
Explaining further, Dr Jayant Jha, Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics, IIT Madras, said R0 depends on three things --
transmissibility probability, contact rate and the expected time interval in which infection can happen.
"Now, with the increase in quarantine measures or restrictions, maybe the contact rate will go down and then in that case R0 can decrease. So, based on our preliminary analysis, which is just based on the last two weeks, we can tell these numbers, but again, these numbers can change based on how much affirmative action is taken with respect to social gathering and all," he told PTI.
The Union Health Ministry on Wednesday said India is seeing an exponential rise in the number of coronavirus cases, which is believed to be driven by the Omicron variant. It also highlighted that the country's R naught value is 2.69, higher than the 1.69 recorded during the peak of the pandemic's second wave.
Jha said the ministry's estimates are based on a different time interval than IIT Madras which has done the preliminary analysis from the past two weeks.
He further said that as per their estimate, the peak in the current wave is expected to come between February 1-15 and it is expected to be sharper than earlier peaks.
"What we expect from the exploratory data analysis is that the peak will happen somewhere between February 1-15 and our analysis also shows that as compared to previous waves, there will be a sharper increase to the peak," Jha said.
He said this wave will be different from the previous waves because of vaccination and factors like less social distancing seen this time.
Responding to how it is estimated that there is less social distancing in this wave, he said during the first wave many restrictions were imposed but right now despite having a high number of cases there are not many restrictions imposed yet.
"But the advantage here is that almost 50 per cent of the population this time has got vaccinated," Jha added.
The preliminary analysis has been done jointly by IIT Madras' Department of Mathematics and Centre of Excellence for Computational Mathematics and Data Science headed by Prof Neelesh S Upadhye and Prof S Sundar.
India saw a single-day rise of 1,41,986 new coronavirus cases, raising the tally to 3,53,68,372, which included 3,071 cases of Omicron variant reported across 27 states and union territories so far, the Union Health Ministry said on Saturday.
Religious leader Nirmalanandanatha Swamiji, Carnatic musicians -- guitarist R. Prasanna and vocalist S. Sowmya -- and chess players S. Kailasanathan and M. Ramesh, among others, too are distinguished alumni of this prestigious institution.
Founded in 1959 with German assistance, IIT-M, an institute of eminence, is a residential institution with nearly 550 faculty, over 10,000 students and more than 1,250 administrative/support staff.
Located in about 250 hectares of greenery in the heart of Chennai, IIT-M boasts of major names in various fields as its alumni, such as Prem Watsa, Founder-Chairman, Fairfax Holdings; Kris Gopalakrishnan, one of the Founders of Infosys; Anand Rajaram and Venky Harinarayanan, Co-Founders of Cambrian Ventures, Kosmiz, Junglee Corp (acquired by Amazon); Gururaj Deshpande, Founder, Sycamore Networks; T.T. Jagannathan, Chairman, TTK Group, and several others.
Here are thumbnail sketches of well and not so well-known IIT Madras alumni who have made a mark for themselves in their respective fields.
S. Kailasanathan, Managing Director, Microsense Group
Seventy-year-old S. Kailasanathan, Managing Director, Microsense Group, won the Tamil Nadu chess championship as a student of IIT-M. He also has the distinction of playing chess for West Bengal and Delhi.
Microsense is majorly into offering WiFi connectivity in major hotel chains and residential apartments, among others. The group will be entering the Middle East market soon.
After getting his business degree from IIM-Calcutta, Kailasanathan began his career with the Electronics Trade and Technology Development Corporation. In 1980s, he founded the Microsense Group.
Sponsoring several young chess players, Microsense also organised coaching camps for upcoming Indian players, roping in two chess legends -- former world champion GM Vladimir Borisovich Kramnik and GM Boris Gelfand.
Nirmalanandanatha Swamiji, Head, Adichunchanagiri Mutt
An M.Tech of IIT-M, Nirmalanandanatha Swamiji - born as Nagaraj Gowda - was appointed as the head of the Adichunchanagiri Mutt.
Prior to joining IIT-M, he had completed his Diploma from a Government Polytechnic College and BE in civil engineering from the National Institute of Engineering, Mysuru.
In 1998, he became a 'sanyasi' (saint), renouncing the worldly life, and in 2013 Nirmalanandanatha became the head of the Adichunchanagiri Mutt.
R. Prasanna, Guitarist
He is a pioneer in playing traditional Carnatic music on guitar. Popularly known as 'Guitar Prasanna', he had studied naval architecture at IIT-M.
Now based in the US, Prasanna says he got interested in guitar at the age of five when he saw his neighbour at Ranipet play the instrument. He says that Carnatic music is part of his DNA and thanks his mother for making him learn it.
Later, as part of rock bands, he toured different parts of India.
Deciding to focus 100 per cent on music, he quit his software profession and majored in Jazz and Classical Composition from the Berklee College of Music.
Prasanna has composed music for several movies, besides playing for the soundtracks for music directors like Ilaiyaraaja, A.R. Rahman, Harris Jayaraj and others.
Sridhar Ramaswamy, Co-Founder, Neeva Inc
If one were asked to name the Indian heading a search engine company, majority of the time the answer will not be Sridhar Ramaswamy, but some other Tamilian name.
After spending several years as SVP Google in the US, Ramaswamy, a 1989 IIT-M pass out, is the Co-Founder of Neeva Inc, a search engine. That too a paid one. The USP being it will be an ads free search engine for $4.95/month.
He had partnered with Vivek Raghunathan, ex-Vice President, Monetisation, at YouTube, and a graduate from IIT Bombay.
Interestingly, Neeva in Tamil 'you come'. The venture of the two ex-IITians that crosses swords with Google has begun recently and one has to wait for the results.
Sridhar Vembu, CEO, Zoho Corporation
Padma Shri Sridhar Vembu graduated with a B.Tech. degree in electrical engineering from IIT-M in 1989 and secured his doctorate from the Princeton University in 1994.
After working in Qualcomm, Vembu joining hands with his brothers and friends co-founded software product company AdventNet, which was later renamed as Zoho Corporation.
Eearlier this year, Zoho Corporation launched Arattai, an instant messaging app, as a rival to WhatsApp.
As a policy, Vembu avoids funding by venture capitalists and the public.
In a tweet, the HRD Ministry has confirmed approval of a total grant of Rs 456.10 crore as one-time additional capital funding for IIT-Kharagpur and three other IITs.
The funding has been earmarked for lab infrastructure, equipment, etc.
As per the ministry's announcement, Rs 151.19 crore has been earmarked for IIT-Kharagpur, followed by Rs 105 crore for IIT-Delhi, Rs 103.41 crore for IIT-Madras and Rs 96.5 crore for IIT-Bombay.
The funding was approved based on proposals submitted by older IITs for augmentation of infrastructure and facilities for holistic excellence.
"IIT-Kharagpur has been focusing towards attracting young talented academicians and post-doctoral fellows from across the world. For this, we need, on one hand, world-class laboratories, high-end equipment to conduct cutting-edge research, and on the other hand, quality living experience such as accommodation facilities.
"Our proposal significantly highlighted this aspect and we aim to use this additional funding towards building these facilities," said IIT-Kharagpur Director Partha Pratim Chakrabarti.
The Institute has already drawn the blueprints to build lab infrastructure of global standard and acquire equipment for technological convergence domains like manufacturing, transportation, VLSI design, cloud computing, smart infrastructure and affordable healthcare, among others.
"We will soon undertake a housing project for facilitating international faculty and post-doctoral fellows. We understand the differential need of these people and are committed to offering them the same world-class experience for their limited durational association with us," added Chakrabarti.
A significant part of the funding will also be used to offer challenge grants and equipment for Central Research facility of the Institute, making them accessible to both faculty and students for research work. Students' innovation projects will also receive a major boost through this supplementary funding.
Another aspect which the Institute will be exploring is students' amenities and well-being. The Institute has already earmarked Rs 10 crore for sports activities and infrastructure and undertaken crowdsourced campaigns as well for promoting students' welfare activities.
"The primary concern in 5G roll out is security. 5G is important because of the scale of impact it can have on the economy and human life in general," said V. Kamakoti, while delivering a lecture at Indian Council of World Affairs here.
With the roll out of 5G, transmission speed could be many times higher than 4G and services such as collaborative manufacturing and remote surgery could be possible.
But in case bad actors exploit any vulnerability in the system, there could be data leakage and denial of services.
"When it comes to national security, we cannot take any chances," he added.
While he said that it would not be advisable to skip rolling out 5G altogether fearing security issues, India, should nevertheless start pushing the indigenisation of technology.
"While indigenisation cannot be achieved overnight, there should be a concrete plan for indigenisation from day one and policy makers should have an India-specific 5G roll out model," he said, while addressing a packed house.
While deploying 5G, it is especially important not to have the software and hardware from the same vendor, explained the professor of computer science and engineering.
"Indigenous microprocessors and nano sensor design research and development and its mandatory use need to be encouraged," Kamakoti said.
The professor recommended that the government step forward to nurture indigenisation and create Indian tech giants with the necessary enabling mechanism from the government to support their sustenance.
"Identify promising Indian 5G equipment industries and source-fund them," he said, giving examples of Signalchips, Nivetti and Tejas Networks.
"Chip-fund should be monitored by a committee coordinated by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology," he said, adding that to ensure security India should also have printed circuit board testing facility for supply chain vulnerabilities.
According to Kamakoti, while the government should take care to maintain existing Indian infrastructure such as BSNL and MTNL, it is also time for India to start planning for a 6G network.
The University of Hyderabad and the Benaras Hindu University have also been recommended to be granted the IoE status. The list of 20 IoEs includes IIT-Bombay, IIT-Delhi and the IISc that feature in top 200 in QS world rankings.
In its 542nd meeting held today, UGC has considered the reports of the Empowered Expert Committee (EEC) appointed by Government under the Chairmanship of N Gopalaswami recommending (15) Public institutions and (15) Private institutions for considering to give status of Institutions of Eminence.
Since the scheme has only provided for (10) Public and (10) Private Institutions, the UGC has examined the list of (15) Public and (15) Private Institutions using transparent and verifiable criteria.
Apart from the public universities, UGC has also recommended the Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry to grant the IoE tag to a number of private universities.
The private including Shiv Nadar University (Uttar Pradesh), O.P. Jindal University (Haryana), Jamia Hamdard (New Delhi), VIT Vellore, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham (Bengaluru), Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology (Bhubaneswar) and the Satya Bharti Foundation.
The universities that have been denied the tag include the Aligarh Muslim University, the Ashoka University, the Tezpur University, the KREA University, the Jadavpur University, the Azim Premji University, Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bengaluru, and Indian Institute of Public Health, Gandhinagar.
"Since the thrust of the scheme is to prepare institutions for the global rankings, no existing institution which has not figured in any of the global/national ranks shall be recommended for the IoE status. Only after exhausting the above criterion, if any slot remains vacant, consideration shall be given to 'yet to be established (Greenfield)' proposals," the ministry said.
They are launching an online self-paced course on foundations of data science, which covers from beginners' level, the mathematical and programming skills required for a data scientist.
This five-month course is affordably priced at Rs 1,000 for students and faculty members, the Institute said in a statement.
"With PadhAI, for us, it is Nation first. One primary goal is to ensure that every college student in our country in engineering, science, or commerce disciplines receives an accessible and foundational understanding of data science," said Mitesh Khapra, Co-Founder, One-Fourth Labs - an IIT Madras incubated Start-up.
"Often data science is taught in isolation and separated from the advanced and more popular topics of machine learning and deep learning. We are working towards bridging this gap with a unified series of courses across these topics," Khapra added.
According to the Institute, there is a rising demand for trained data scientists across most industries such as manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, education and IT.
To step-up to this demand, an increasing number of professionals and students are looking for good quality data science courses.
However, most courses are expensively priced ranging from tens of thousands to even lakhs of rupees, thereby putting a heavy premium on acquiring skills towards this lucrative career path.
The courses in PadhAI are designed towards providing foundational insight. The PadhAI course on data science begins on 1st February 2020 and is accepting enrolments at padhai.onefourthlabs.in
The professors are expecting to follow-up this course on data science with subsequent affordably priced courses on Machine Learning and Deep Learning.
(IANS)
These coatings are expected to be effective up to 60 wash cycles, thereby making the textiles re-usable.
The coated textiles can be primarily used to manufacture N95 masks, surgical masks, Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and food packaging bags, among others, with inherent properties of inactivating the virus.
According to the Institute, Muse Wearables' current pilot machine can coat textiles of length up to 100 metres within a few minutes, thereby making it a viable commercial solution that can be deployed immediately.
Muse Wearables was incubated by IIT Madras Incubation Cell.
"They have quickly mobilised and repurposed their offerings in response to the situation and are striving to make a positive contribution to the nation's anti-virus efforts," Dr Tamaswati Ghosh, Chief Executive Officer, IIT Madras Incubation Cell, said in a statement.
Some highlights of these nano-particles coated textiles include, anti-microbial properties -- it continuously captures and destroys viruses and other microbes upon contact. Other viruses are as small as 30 nanometres can also be inactivated permanently.
It does not leach while washing in water and is environment-friendly. At present, the particles can be coated on materials like cotton, polyester and cotton – polyester. More fabrics will be tested soon.
It is non-toxic and therefore can be safely used for making masks and other PPEs, the Insititute.
Currently, the startup is assembling the coating machine and will shortly commence coating various textiles with different nanoparticle solutions.
Their coated textiles are expected to be ready for testing by the first week of May 2020. The start-up is also partnering with a mask manufacturing company to launch five-layered Antiviral N95 Masks at an estimated price of Rs 300 per piece.
(IANS)
This game is browser-based and can be played on any device including Personal Computers, laptops, tablets and mobile phones, among others.
Based on initial prototyping and feedback from different audiences, the students team translated the game to several Indian regional languages to improve its reach.
"The IITM Covid game is a small but very meaningful and engaging contribution, and it clearly exhibits how thoughtful and aware our students are," Preeti Aghalayam, Department of Chemical Engineering, IIT Madras, said in a statement.
This game was created by students who took a nine-credit elective course called 'Let's Play To Learn' offered during the January-May 2020 Semester, in which students were taught game-based learning tools and techniques.
The game takes inspiration from the famous 'Super Mario' game and consists of a character who encounters various right things -- like masks, washing hands and also encounters things to be avoided -- like hugs, handshakes.
s the character does the right things, points keep getting added. If the character fails to avoid a wrong thing, points get deducted to highlight the consequence.
The game goes on for one minute and the players should aim for maximum points. The students plan to make the game available in more regional games in the future.
The game is available free of cost and can be played from the home page of www.letsplaytolearn.com'. It is also available in the website of IIT Madras.
(IANS)
Also Read | Games That Indian Millennials Are Playing Post PUBG Ban
All those who have tested positive including research scholars and staff have been admitted to the Kings Institute here.
The students allege that the IIT-M's decision to run only one mess could be the most probable reason for the large scale spread of coronavirus.
One cannot ensure mask or social distancing as students mostly eat and are in congregation -- that too in large numbers.
A total of 774 students are in the campus and most of those who were infected were residents of two hostels -- Krishna and Jamuna.
"These two hostels were not used as Covid-19 quarantine centres. The infection could be multiple sources," a research scholar told IANS preferring anonymity.
According to the scholar, there are women students who have been infected and admitted in the Kings Institute.
On December 6, there was an information that about five tested positive for the virus in Krishna Hostel. Five more tested positive on December 7/8. After that inmates of Krishna hostel were asked to go into quarantine and everybody was asked to undergo tests, the scholar added.
Queried about informing the parents, the scholar said all are mature and have been diagnosed with minimal symptoms.
"As of now I haven't seen parents coming to Kings Institute," the scholar said.
The IIT-M has decided to shutdown all its departments, centres and asked their staff to work from home and anyone with the symptoms like fever, dry cough, sore throat, diarrhoea, loss of taste /smell, or any other symptoms have been requested to get in touch the hospital officials.
The post graduate students, research scholars and others have been asked to be confined to their rooms with arrangements made to deliver food to their rooms.
On Sunday, 32 fresh coronavirus infected cases were reported and the Tamil Nadu government has instructed that all the students be tested for the virus infection.
Till Sunday, there were 66 students and five staff members who had tested positive for coronavirus infection.
According to officials, the students who had returned to the campus were quarantined for two weeks, but the quarantining capacity is limited.
Those who have been infected with coronavirus are progressing well, officials said.
(With IANS Inputs)