The year 2020 proved to be a testing time globally, affecting the very existence of humanity as coronavirus attacked not just health but livelihood too. As lockdown of countries restricted movement, many healthcare providers had to take recourse to the digital medium to reach out to patients, dealing with not just COVID-19 but other general health issues as well. Amid the pandemic, the availability of ICU beds became a challenge globally. In India, the lack of ICU beds was a major concern even before the pandemic. Most of the beds are concentrated in the private sector, with substantial variation in available resources across states. When the country was at the peak of the pandemic, Mudit Dandwate and Gaurav Parchani came up with a solution to partly address this situation, through a device called Dozee.
Dozee is a device which can turn the mattress of a regular hospital bed into an ICU-bed within two minutes when placed under the mattress. It offers a contact-free monitoring system by gathering a patient’s vital parameters including heart rate, oxygen saturation levels, blood pressure, among others by using the Ballistocardiograph (BCG) technology. Dozee is very easy to set up. Once it is connected to power, the hub is visible on the phone via the Dozee app and just needs a Wi-Fi connection.
This app stays connected all the time and one doesn’t need to check if it is working. All one needs to do is sleep on it and it will show the heart rate and range, respiration and stress recovery, right from the time the patient goes to sleep till wake-up
Mudit Dandwate (left) and Gaurav Parchani, the creators of Dozee
Time in the morning. Setting up Dozee requires minimal technical expertise and can be used at home as well. It can help reduce the workload of healthcare staff by almost 50% and provide proactive care.
In the first five days of using Dozee, the app calculates the normal range of parameters for the user and then sets the range. It has medical-grade accuracy of 98.4% — as accurate as ECG, 2D Doppler Echo, RIP Bands.
Priced at Rs 7,999, it is about 1/10th the cost of conventional alternatives. The device also lets clinicians set thresholds to trigger alerts for body vitals. The data is uploaded on cloud to give remote access, so that it can be accessed from a safe distance. This data is further analysed using advanced machine
Data collected by Dozee can be accessed from a safe distance learning and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to create health data of the user. In the times of COVID-19 pandemic, thousands of beds were enabled with health monitoring, helping patients across seven states in India.
Dandwate, an alumnus of IIT Bombay, was designing race cars before starting Dozee, where vibration sensors are used to check the health of cars; Dozee monitors the micro vibrations in human body in a similar way. Dandwate was working in an automobile company in Germany, when he came up with the idea of Dozee. He decided to take action on his 24th birthday. He resigned and came to India to manufacture a health monitor. He roped in Gaurav Parchani (co-founder) and Pritish Gupta (COO). Their idea was simple — to make a gadget which would provide an “8-hour continuous health check-up when we sleep because even though we spend most of our time at home, there are no high-quality healthcare devices there,” they say.
The team of Dozee has partnered with WISH foundation and Tamil Nadu Government for putting the device to practical use. Dozee was able to aid.
Remote Access Healthcare For Mothers-to-be
Lakhs of women die preventable deaths every year due to pregnancy-related complications. Although maternal deaths have declined in recent years, India still accounts for about one-fifth of global maternal deaths annually. Many health departments in India are short-staffed, especially in rural areas, where women are nearly three times more likely to die from complications during pregnancy or childbirth than those in urban areas. Many of these women in rural areas are still wary of modern healthcare system and cannot afford to make frequent visits to far-off hospitals. Even the child is 15 times more likely to die before the age of two in rural areas. Technology, though, is not scarce in rural India with nearly a billion active phone subscribers in the country. This opens the door for some solutions and innovations like SaveMom that can play a critical role in saving lakhs of lives every year.
A unique jewellery-inspiredwearable device, Allowear, with sixmonth battery life is a major part of this innovation. Among other things, it tracks sleeping and gives reminders for medicines. This has been especially designed to discourage men of the pregnant women’s household from using this device. The second component is Allotricoder, an integrated non-invasive device that captures six vitals digitally — blood pressure, heart rate, temperature, respiratory rate, ECG, oxygen saturation and glucose — and sends it to AI engine for analysis. The third component is AlloBMI, a simple weighing scale integrated with the application to monitor the steady rise in weight during pregnancy.
SaveMom was created in 2016 by Sunder Jagannathan and M. Senthil Kumar. Kumar visited his pregnant sister in 2016 who lived on the outskirts of Madurai. She had to travel all the way to a city hospital for regular checkups. Kumar asked her gynaecologist about the vital parameters tracked for pregnant women. He got all the blood pressure and blood glucose measuring devices and replaced their display screens with a blue chip that would SMS his sister’s readings to the doctor who would then evaluate them and message her back. Senthil realised he could help many more women who had little or no access to healthcare facilities.
SaveMom has covered 100 villages in India so far with its antenatal and postnatal healthcare service provided to mother and infant for 1,000 days. JioVio has collaborated with the government and NGOs to provide care for 1,000 days to mother and child for Rs 1,000 covering 15 antenatal check-ups of the mother and postnatal care of the baby. The application is already in use in more than a hundred villages in southern India and has benefitted more than 2,000 pregnant women.
SaveMom has also successfully addressed data manipulation malpractices of healthcare workers. It has ensured that vital information can only be collected in the homes of the pregnant women after the synchronisation of the wearable devices to a mobile app. The process has also ensured that the health worker visits the home of the pregnant woman every two weeks. The collected information can be sent to the doctor, who can prescribe medicines and good diet. SaveMom was initially made to help urban women, but now the company has realised that rural women vastly outnumber those in urban area and their needs are greater.
