It has been learnt from official sources that DRDO is offering states an IT driven approach to enable tracking of people under quarantine or isolation.
The solution called SAMPARC (Smart Automated Management of PAtients and Risks for COVID-19) is a software that includes an App that would be installed on the smartphones of the patients, and a serverside application that would be used by the state authorities to track the patients. 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 crowd sourced data. The system would enable Geo-fencing, AI based automated face recognition between selfie taken during registration and subsequent selfies sent by the patient, and would have the capability to display the information to the state officials on a map which can be color coded to depict hotspots and containment zones.
From the perspective of the patients, honest usage of SAMPARC could give them an option of home isolation instead of isolation in a government facility. From the perspective of the state officials, SAMPARC is expected to drastically reduce the overhead of tracking every patient under home isolation. They would need to track the violators, and need to perform only random checks. The violators would be shown in Red on a map if they break the Geo-fence or their Selfie does not match, would be shown in blue if their smartphones stop sending periodic updates, and green if everything is found satisfactory. Once the period of quarantine or isolation is over, the patients can uninstall the App from their smartphone.
It is learnt that many state governments are already exploring the utilization of the SAMPARC system, and its overall deployment is expected to grow.
It has also been learnt that the development of the software has been done by a premier lab of DRDO, and includes contributions from a young scientist lab of DRDO that was set up recently by the Honorable PM.
