An Urban Designer & Architect
Svasth Setu
Tech Solutions for Rural India | Government of India. | 2020
Svasth Setu, was featured in the Publication for Urban Futures post COVID-19 in the National Institute of Urban Affairs(NIUA), India’s leading national think tank on urban planning and development.
The project understands that less than 50% of India has access to smart phones and internet. Tech-based solutions would only be useful for a certain percentage of the country, who are also more resilient. Hence, an economical scale-able and off-the-grid solution for contact tracing, maintaining hygiene and checking symptoms would be an ideal fit for a country like India.
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Introducing the Covid Bands - that work without any app, smart phones or internet. They communicate with each other via a 'band-to-band' technology. These bands would be distributed based on individual identity cards and a registry would be maintained at the war rooms. The key features are: (i) they change colour when the patient gets fever, (ii) keeps track of all other bands its been in contact with within 1 metre and (iii) vibrates when the hand is raised to touch the face hence helping with personal hygiene.
When a rural user notices that the colour has changed for a prolonged period, he / she calls the authority. They then test and isolate and check who else the band has been in contact with. Once traced, they repeat the same procedure of testing, isolating and contact tracing with all other band holders who have been thus traced.
