IIT researchers develop AI-based mobile app for Covid patients

The Home Quarantine Management Application (HQMA), called LakshmanRekha, uses a combination of biometric verification, geofencing and AI.

"We have developed a pilot version of LakshmanRekha mobile application and tested it over small datasets. The obtained results are very good and now we are working to add more functionality, scalability and usability to make it ready for deployment," Aditya Nigam, Associate Professor, School of Computing & Electrical Engineering, IIT Mandi, said in a statement.

In addition to the quarantine management, this application can also serve as an unbreachable mobile phone platform for normal (non-Covid) mobile users, situations like under curfew, or any national emergency, for identifying the violators or lawbreakers.

According to the researchers, in existing quarantine management mobile applications, individuals under self-isolation have to share their instantaneous position routinely via geofencing technology or they are required to upload a face selfie every hour or ten times a day. But these geofencing applications fail to ensure the user identity throughout the time because individuals can leave cell phones in isolation zones and move in/out, violating the self-isolation rules.

Similarly, the idea of uploading a face selfie every hour cannot ensure the patient's stay in a geofenced area as they can also try to fool the system by using a photo containing its registered face, the team said.

To mitigate these risks, LakshmanRekha matches the quarantine location of the individual with the location from where they have uploaded the biometric data, according to the findings published in the IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine.

Along with this, using AI, the application continually computes an authentication score that can measure how certain it is that the quarantined user is also the one using the mobile.

If the application detects any action indicating that the user identity has been changed, it will directly notify the authorities for necessary action, the team said.