In a bid to help the medical workers and to encourage citizens to reduce contact with COVID-19 patients, Brother-duo Vinayak Tara and Kartik Tara, aged 8 and 12 years old in India have developed Ventilators and Automatic Water and Sanitizer machines to help reduce contact between healthcare workers and COVID-19 patients.
Created at a bare minimum cost, these prototypes can be installed at Hospitals, Vegetable Mandis, Kirana Stores, Police Stations, and even Police Vans. Both siblings have been pursuing a course in Robotics for 4 years through RoboChamps, an Edutech startup.
With this initiative, they aim to help Prime Minister Narendra Modi in this fight and seek support from the Government to make these models in bulk quantity for hospitals to overcome shortages immediately.
Several medical staff, including doctors and nurses in India, have been reported to get infected while treating patients. People walking down the streets to buy essentials also have potential in the community spread of the virus.
Therefore, to curb the spread further and help the frontline staff, the duo created the automatic sanitizer dispenser prototype that can detect a hand from a range of 2 cms.
It works in the same manner as to how automatic taps work in malls, but the interesting aspect is that it has been built within a price bracket of Rs 850. Robochamps, the guiding inspiration for these kids, is aiming to deliver 100’s of products immediately and has urged the support of the Indian government.
Similarly, for helping frontline medical staff at hospitals, the kids have created Automatic Ventilators by converting the existing manual ventilators available in the market.
A balloon-like structure is being compressed by a motor between two wooden walls (acting as hands) set at a particular speed and time as the ventilator is connected to the circuit and interfaced with a mobile app so that the patient’s health can be monitored closely through the mobile app. The entire design is created to be economically viable within a price range of Rs. 1560.
The working prototype is tested and proven to be successful and can be helpful for medical staff and hospitals. The sibling duo conceptualized, designed and built the automated machines under the guidance of Mr. Akshay Ahuja, Founder, RoboChamps.
Speaking on the development, Mr. Akshay Ahuja, Founder, RoboChamps said, “Currently a lot of health establishments and bodies have been working on developing new prototypes of a ventilator using 3D printing to help with the shortage of ventilators. However, the model developed by our students is completely different as we are rather converting manual ventilators into automatic, but the process will be the same, to pump the balloon and use two wooden walls instead of hands to avoid human interaction.”
“We were working on a B2B model before the lockdown where we offered Robotics and Coding courses by setting up labs in schools. However, due to the corona lockdown, we found it difficult to keep educating children due to our offline model. Hence, we have started consulting them through video conferencing to help them continue with their education,” he added.
“During the lockdown, both our students were bored and thought of creating some robot so we started thinking of innovative ways of how we could create a robot that could help during Corona, this is where the idea to create this robot prototype came in mind,” Akshay added.
Apart from this, the brother duos are also working on two more robotic prototypes that include “Robot to deliver food to COVID-19 patients without human intervention. This robot can be customized as per beds in the hospital and can supply food to every patient automatically.
The second one will be a structure that can sanitize the whole body when someone passes through it. This structure can be installed in schools, malls, and other crowded places once the lockdown is over.
Speaking on the development, Katik Tara, of Class 8th, said: “Since the lockdown, we have been seeing news all over the internet, television about how Corona has affected countries, people and economies at a large scale.
We got inspired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s initiatives along with a few other startups for dealing with Corona. I want to contribute to society and promote Skill India.”
Whereas, 8-year-old Vinayak Tara of Class in his statement added, “I am ecstatic that we created something that will help hospitals and public places. Akshay sir has been mentoring us constantly on a video call and I want to thank him for all his hard work.”