In order to aid community health workers provide healthcare support to last-mile populations, Professor Suman Chakraborty and his team, who recently won the Infosys Prize, have developed a number of technologies. The latest pandemic has in particular motivated their initiative.
 

The resource-intensive RT-PCR for testing infectious diseases has been replaced by a rapid diagnostic test for detecting infectious diseases based on nucleic acids called COVIRAP. Several businesses and organisations have received the technology. Without modifying the hardware, it can be utilised for any infectious disease detection by properly customising and preprogramming the device in accordance with the relevant test procedure.

A smartphone-based programme called Diagnostics with Finger-Prick Blood on Paper Strip can quantitatively evaluate plasma glucose, haemoglobin, creatinine, and lipid profile from finger-prick blood collected on a paper-strip. The paper strip communicates with a handheld device to obtain the test results, just way a credit card does with a card reader. This can be applied to community-level mass screening for a number of non-communicable diseases.

 

The group has created a low-cost portable hand-held imaging equipment for the early detection of oral cancer using measurements of changes in the tissue's blood flow rate obtained via thermal imaging and analytics. It doesn't need any special clinical equipment. This portable device can be used to classify the stages of oral cancer and assess early risk. This technique can also be applied to other types of cancer. The device has entered field trial mode after passing the Phase I clinical trial with flying colors.

Additionally, they have created a portable spinning disc that can test a number of body fluid-based diagnostic parameters using just one drop of fluid. It was designed and validated to measure Complete Blood Count (CBC) using this platform. The test results are read out using an electrochemical sensor that has been integrated. It is intended to take the place of the lab centrifuge when conducting diagnostic tests.

To address the rising difficulty of evaluating antibiotic resistance, the group has created a folded paper kit. By observing the colour changes at certain test-spots on the kit, the user can determine whether bacteria are susceptible to a particular medication. In this way, a recommendation on the effectiveness of particular drugs for killing the bacteria may be made in 3–4 hours, facilitating timely clinical decision-making that could save lives.

They have created a reagent-free anaemia detection method that takes advantage of the way blood spreads on a moist paper strip to create distinctive patterns. When analysed using a specially developed image-analytics App, the pattern carries the signature of the red blood cell contents in such a way that those for anaemic and normal patients may be classified and interpreted to be drastically different. By doing this, at-risk patients who require an urgent blood transfusion or other life-saving measures can be quickly identified.
 

Professor Chakraborty, a J.C. Bose National Fellow of the Department of Science and Technology's (DST) attached institute of Science and Engineering Research Broad (SERB), trained a large number of rural women to serve as an intermediary between the patient, "remote" doctor, and newly developed inexpensive diagnostic technologies, enabling sustainable livelihood in the process. Additionally, by enabling micro, small, and medium-sized businesses to participate in the production of the most cutting-edge yet deceptively basic medical supplies, a new paradigm for creating jobs in challenging conditions has emerged.