iit gandhi nagar
Source: Hindustan Times

IIT Gandhinagar ‘develops’ interactive dashboard to help contain COVID-19 community infection post lockdown

 

An interactive COVID-19 dashboard has been developed by the researchers at IIT Gandhinagar. This dashboard can help the administrators, hospitals and the public in planning optimized testing for the novel coronavirus and containing community infection in various post-lockdown schemes.

The researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar (IITGN) said that the dashboard will offer different epidemiological scenario-specific information at a city-scale.

They further added that this dashboard is aimed to help the different stakeholders. This dashboard will optimized testing efforts and post-lockdown operations to contain community infection.

The dashboard is named as MIR AHD Covid-19 Dashboard. MIR AHD Covid-19 Dashboard integrates the complex social and transportation patterns with state-of-the-art epidemic spread models, in addition to testing and quarantining rates, and contact tracing rates.

Udit Bhatia, Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering at IITGN, and one of the lead researchers of the project said that MIR AHD Covid-19 is intended to transmit information to stakeholders and the public that can help them make research-backed decisions during the time of crisis.

Udit Bhatia also told PTI that this model depends on their US patented technology. This model takes account of the travel preferences in the town and ranks different road segments according to their relative importance in the network.

Udit Bhatia confirmed that the team is discussing their project with some other government agents. These agencies can use this dashboard to handle different scenarios.

The researchers, including Prasanna Venkatesh B from IITGN, believe that the disease normally spread in densely populated areas, intra-community and inter-community. The interaction in these areas usually results in the spread of the disease.
For policymakers and administrators, they said, the dashboard can simulate the rate of COVID-19 spread in various zones of a city under the different lockdown strategies that have been implemented or under consideration to apply.
They further explain that for policymakers and administrators, the dashboard can simulate the rate of COVID-19 spread in various zones of a city under several lockdown strategies that have been implemented or under consideration to apply.

According to the researchers, the dashboard has a feature is providing information to the authorities about the most critical intersections in the city if it decides to implement drive-through testing.

This dashboard will help the general public by informing them about the number of cases for all the districts, they explained.

According to researchers, including Deep Chakrabarti from King George’s Medical University, Uttar Pradesh, the dashboard can also provide the maps of the red, green and orange zone, and COVID-19 hospitals.

They said that if In case the users want to avoid traveling through a particular zone, this dashboard also provides the location of government testing laboratories and an interactive slider to choose travel paths. The team is using census 2011 and 2020 population data for city, combined with land-use maps.

The researchers said that the patient count, hospitals, city-wide zoning, and testing site locations are updated in real-time based on various application programming interfaces (APIs). More features such as trajectories are also added to the dashboard.

The researchers commented that the stakeholders can also apply for the job requests on the dashboard, and the team will provide the outputs relevant to that strategy.

The dashboard is successfully tested in Ahmedabad. The researchers said that they are also working on modifying the model to other Indian cities and states which have been identified as hotspots by the Ministry of Home Affairs.

Udit Bhatia notes that the researchers from Germany are also interested to explore the possibility of making similar exercises operational in their cities.

 

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