On May 15, 2020, Researchers at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)- Gandhinagar (IITGN), Gujarat, have developed an interactive COVID-19 dashboard named “MIR AHD Covid-19 Dashboard”, that can help administrators, hospitals as well as public in planning optimised testing for the novel coronavirus and containing community infection in various post-lockdown scenarios.
Key Points:
i.MIR AHD Covid-19 Dashboard: The dashboard provides different epidemiological scenario-specific information at a city-scale.
ii.It integrates the complex social and transportation patterns with state-of-the-art epidemic spread models, in addition to testing, quarantining rates and contact tracing rates.
iii.Udit Bhatia, Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering at IITGN, and one of the lead researchers of the project, also noted that the model relies on their US (United States) patented technology that takes into account of the travel preferences in the town & ranks different road segments according to their relative importance in the network.
iv.The researchers, including Prasanna Venkatesh B from IITGN, added that in densely populated areas, intra-community and inter-community interactions become an important accelerator in COVID-19 disease spread.
v.Other features: The dashboard provides information to the stakeholders about the most critical intersections in the city if it decides to implement “drive-through testing”.
vi.It also provides real-time information on the number of cases for all the districts and location of government testing laboratories. The dashboard can provide maps of the red, green and orange zone, and COVID-19 hospitals.
vii.The Research team is using census 2011 and 2020 population data for the city, combined with land-use maps. Patient count, hospitals, city-wide zoning, and testing site locations are updated in real-time based on various application programming interfaces (APIs).
viii.Features such as trajectories are also integrated into the dashboard. The initial test bed is Ahmedabad, Gujarat, the researchers are working on expanding the model to other Indian cities and states which have been identified as hotspots by the Ministry of Home Affairs(MHA).
About IITGN:
Director– Professor Sudhir Jain.
About Gujarat:
Capital– Gandhinagar.
Chief Minister(CM)– Vijay Ramniklal Rupani.
Governor– Acharya Devvrat.
