DRDO develops 'SAMPARC' to track COVID-19 patients in quarantine, here's how it works

India’s Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO) has reportedly developed a software tool that would ensure citizens follow quarantine measures. The software would reportedly be implemented in partnership with Telangana Information Technology Association (TITA). This comes as 9,06,752 people have tested positive for coronavirus across the country. 

Credits: DRDO

Intelligent automated tracking

The software aimed at reducing the workload of law enforcement and health officials is named Smart Automated Management of Patients and Risks for COVID-19 (SAMPARC). As per DRDO, the application facilitates an intelligent automated tracking of quarantine or isolation patients and is programmed to generate an alert if there are quarantine violations or willful suppression of movement details.

"The highlights of the solution are that it is meant only for tracking and not for contact tracing. Therefore, it does not need any private information of the patient except his/her location of quarantine and the current location of the patient, as well as their photographs. It would be based on authentic information fed by the state officials and not based on crowdsourced data," DRDO said on its website.  

Explaining the reason behind creating the application Sundeep Kumar Makthala, Global President, TITA reportedly said that there were multiple reports that patients in quarantine were moving out in public, creating extra work for law enforcers. According to officials, the SAMPARC solution can be deployed as national service by National Information Centre or can be distributed as a state-wise or region wise service. The application also allows geofencing, face recognition, display of data on maps amongst other features.

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According to reports, the application is needed to be installed on patients smartphones and would run as a background service. In addition, it would automatically restart even if the phone is rebooted. Dr Rituraj Kumar, scientists at the Centre for AI and Robotics at DRDO said that the app also sends out alerts if the patient's selfie does not match the photo taken during registration. He added that the application would display potential violations as a red symbol. As per DRDO, the app does not cost any charges to the patients and would require information like name, cell phone number, IMEI of the phone, coordinates of the quarantine location, duration of quarantine, email id and optionally photographs of the patient for AI-based face detection.

As per the developers, the application will send the patient's location every ten minutes.  Also, the patients will also be required to send selfies which would be sent to the server for automated AI basic facial recognition. Once the quarantine is over, the application could be removed from the tracking and the patients can successfully uninstall the application.

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Image credits: PTI