The COVID-19 pandemic has phones, and thereby prevent the spread ensured a permanent place in of the disease. history for the year 2020, for To help prevent infections in hospiwhich, alas, there is no end in sight yet.
Among other things, however, that tion-proof fabric. This fabric has been will always have a supporting role in any developed by Fabiosys Innovations, a feature on the year 2020, technology will start-up established at IIT Delhi. definitely perform a headline act. That’s because when the world went into the BAN ON CHINESE APPS, A BOON FOR lockdown, the locked up people had not INDIA’S OWN PRODUCTS much to turn to, except gadgets and new Through various lists released over the tech (apart from cooking, eating, sleep- past few months, the Ministry of Ining, and repeating the drill).
Here, we present some gadgets and nearly 200 Chinese apps, given their apps that have found a place in our surreptitious nature of comprising Inhomes and mobile phones, largely due dia’s sovereignty and integrity. If you had to the situation created by coronavirus. been hooked to some of those and are now looking for alternatives, here is a
HOMEGROWN GADGETS IN THE TIME handy list:OF COVID-19
Scientists across the world, including In- ShareChat: Alternative to TikTok dia, are investing their potential to create ShareChat is an Indian social network smart solutions to mitigate the coronavi- app to communicate and get daily news rus impact. in seconds. It does not provide one-on-
Research one chat, the conversation starts in comscholars at Jawa- ments section of a post. Its features are: harlal Nehru • Available in 14 Indian languages (exCentre for Ad- cept English) allowing users to share vanced Scientific jokes, WhatsApp status and memes in
Research (JN-CASR), Bengaluru, have developed a spray-on anti-microbial coating. The spray is made to disinfect surfaces like plastic or textile. Similarly, to meet the their native language
high demand for testing for the virus, IIT • Allows download of high-quality imGuwahati has developed a polymerase ages, wallpapers and videos chain reaction (PCR) machine with a • Just like TikTok, users can showcase target to check up to 1,000 samples in 12 their talent by sharing videos hours. Guwahati Medical College has al- ready received two units of the machine. TapScanner: Alternative to Besides, IIT Guwahati has also made CamScanner
a drone equipped with an automated TapScanner creates crisp scanned docusprayer that can sanitise public spaces to ments. Its powerful post-processing help prevent the spread of coronavirus. makes it one of the best CamScanner
IIT Bombay, on the other hand,has alternatives. Its features are: come up with an app called Corontine
- It can take three simultaneous photos 54 SCIENCE INDIA SCIENCE INDIA NOVEMBER, 2020NOVEMBER, 2020
- and create detailed scanned documents
- Intelligent automatic edge detection
- Supports OCR
- (Optical Character Recognition) • Saves as JPG, PNG, and PDF
- Signs PDF digitally
- Allows seamless sharing of files to the cloud
Bharat Browser: Alternative of UC Browser
Developed by a Bengaluru-based startup, BlueSky Inventions, the home screen has content from Indian states and union territories. Its features are:
- An integrated search bar and realtime news updates in nine Indian
languages - Browser has a section for kids with preloaded videos, rhymes, and games
- Designed under 8MB App size, one of the lowest memory footprints for any such app worldwide
- Works seamlessly on the lowest cost Android Smartphone available in India
Jio Switch: Alternative to SHAREit
Reliance Industries’ JioSwitch allows users to transfer all kinds of media without any limit and across all platforms. Its features are:
• Supports easy file transfer between iOS and Android
• The app has no advertisements • Supports file-sharing between PCs and mobiles by scanning QR code • No limit on file size and file types • Supports offline file transfers
