UPES students design Automated Monitored Hand Hygiene System to fight COVID-19 pandemic

Final year students of Mechanical Engineering Rithvik Kanchi and Shashank Singh Deo, under the guidance of Dr. Ashish Karn, designed and developed an Automated Monitored Hand Hygiene System to curb the spread of infection in institutional settings

After a prolonged period of lockdown, systems are looking forward to opening up gradually to continue to sustain. This however poses a challenge in maintaining personal hygiene and safety from COVID-19. Sensing an opportunity to make a difference, students of B.Tech Mechanical Engineering Rithvik Kanchi and Shashank Singh Deo came up with an innovative automated hand hygiene system to suit the need of the hour. This innovative product has been designed and deployed by the team of researchers from MultiPhase Flows Laboratory (MPFL), UPES. The project has been proposed to National Innovation Foundation for possible funding support.

Says Shashank, senior undergraduate member of the team, “I always wondered about the primitive ways we sanitized our hands in public or community places. The motivation for the invention came from the lack of facility that we faced. To develop a design to facilitate hygienic conditions was our aim and shall I say we succeeded! This was made possible because the minds and hearts of the people who worked upon the idea synchronised to give birth to something that could be useful for the society.”

The product is designed in a way to provide for hand sanitization of multiple individuals simultaneously, while ensuring social distancing between them.  Dr. Ashish Karn further delineates the benefits of the product. Says he, “With its monitored compliance and recording system, the system identifies individuals in an institution who need proper educational intervention regarding compliance.” He further adds that the proposed product will not only reduce the apprehensions of the workers in an institution by providing for solutions to curb infection spread, but will also be economical and aesthetically compact to be deployed at multiple locations within an organisation, thus providing for a much safer workplace during the post-lockdown phase.

Rithvik Kanchi, another student who is a part of the team, explains that this was his first deliberate project towards human development and prevention welfare. An elated Rithvik adds, “It was exciting to observe and ideate on simple mechanical arrangements, combine them with electronics and gain larger output from a small-scale effort. Cheers to our team leader and whole-hearted gratitude for his treasured inputs which I had the opportunity to work on.”