IIT Mandi Researchers Develop Artificial Intelligence-based Home Quarantine Application App: Here’s How It Works

IIT Mandi researchers recently developed an artificial intelligence-based biometric driven Home Quarantine Management Application (HQMA) for COVID patients called LakshmanRekha. The application, which can be used to monitor COVID-19 patients under quarantine as well as non-COVID mobile users in situations like under curfew, or any national emergency for identifying the violators or lawbreakers, continuously monitors and identifies the person involved through a combination of biometric verification, geofencing, and artificial intelligence.

The project was funded by the Department of Science and Technology, and the research findings have been published in the IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine. “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,” said Dr Aditya Nigam, Associate Professor, School of Computing and Electrical Engineering, IIT Mandi, who has authored the paper published in IEEE.

How to IIT Mandi Artificial Intelligence-based LakshmanRekha App Works

The LakshmanRekha app would be available for administrators and patients. The administration app will have the option to register the patient by providing some basic information such as name, date of birth, pincode, period and starting date of quarantine. After entering the required information, the photograph of the patient needs to be captured using the face recognition system.

While capturing the photo, the app automatically records the GPS location for geofencing purposes. The photo is only captured after the face of the patient is properly aligned through the smart capturing system. The app will run in the background, and the patient can use the phone without any hindrance. The app will keep capturing the photos of the patient and GPS location.

Along with this, using artificial intelligence, 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 administrator will be given an option to gain information from the app anytime they wish to monitor the patient. The administrator will be informed about how far the phone is from the patient, and whether the photo captured by the app is of the patient or not.