A trio of three 21-year-old engineers from
Indore brought pride to the city by emerging as the National Winners of
all-India ‘healthcare innovation hackathon - Code to Care Challenge 2019’ held
at innovation centre, Bengaluru and were awarded Rs 1 lakh.
Top 80 engineering colleges of India with
over 7,500 team members had participated in the event seeking the grand prize
money. Top 10 teams, including that of Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs),
International Institute of Information Technology (IIITs), Birla Institute of
Technology and Science (BITS), etc. were selected for the national finals.
Amul Verma, Avani Chaskar and Ashutosh
Maheshwari from Shri Govindram Seksaria Institute of Technology and Science
(SGISTS) had participated in state level of the competition with hope to make
their mark in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).
“It was intimidating to compete with so
many good engineers, whose ideas were quite innovative as well,” Ashutosh said.
He was born and brought up in Burhanpur, MP and has been studying in Indore for
the last three years.
“We were given three problem statements and
we had to come up with a solution for any one of them, which was then presented
in the national competition,” Amul said. The three problem statements given to
students were: solving challenges in hospital resource management, detecting a
disease through AI setup, and finding innovative application of internet of
things to healthcare.
“We chose to detect a disease through AI,
because it was easy to relate to and much-needed to make healthcare more
effective and save lives,” Avani said.
After considering various problem and
diseases faced by people commonly, the trio came up with the idea of
identifying menstrual abnormalities. “Only a percentage of people in a certain
age group suffer from diabetes, high or low blood pressure, typhoid, malaria,
etc. and these diseases are depended upon many factors,” Ashutosh said.
The trio felt that the number of problems
faced by women like irregular cycles, premenstrual syndrome, fibroids, hypomenorrhea,
hormonal imbalances, trauma, infections, etc is rising.
“Most women suffer from premenstrual
syndrome so it affects a majority of population across the world,” Amul said. The
solution crafted by students was an artificial intelligence setup, which can
track premenstrual symptoms, problems and predict upcoming period and possible
prevention tips to avoid diseases.
There were many other projects, but their
idea was novel and marked the first in the competition ever, as shared by guiding
professor DA Mehta. “One can build an artificial intelligence setup for many
problems, but unless they are practically feasible and applicable to mass, they
are not fruitful,” Mehta said.
“An engineer emerges as a winner when
he/she becomes practical considering real-time application of their skills, and
that’s the secret our proud winners,” Dr Urjita Thakar, head of computer
science department, said.