NUST DEVELOPS BILINGUAL APP FOR CORONAVIRUS SCREENING

Furthering its streak of tangible contributions to help the Government steer the country through the COVID-19 outbreak, researchers at the National Centre of Robotics & Automation (NCRA), NUST College of Electrical & Mechanical Engineering (CEME), have developed a bilingual (Urdu and English) screening app, which is the world’s first Urdu Andriod-based app for COVID-19 screening, enabling Pakistanis to self-screen for COVID-19. Developed at the NCRA’s Robot Design & Development (RDD) Lab, the app, named COVID CHECK PAKISTAN, has been used for over 8000 screenings (and counting) in 9 different countries, including US, UK, UAE and Saudi Arabia, within the first 2 days of its beta rollout on March 23, 2020. The app enables citizens to carry out initial screening to ecaluate risk, while staying at home and not putting themselves and others at risk by going to hospitals. The app is available at http://ncra.org.pk/covid/​

The screening app is one of the indigenous products NUST has developed to counter the pandemic, which were put on display during the visit of Federal Minister for Science & Technology, H.E. Chaudhry Fawad Hussain, to NUST on April 2, 2020. Other projects demonstrated during the Minister’s visit include tele-operated robot and aerial spraying drone for decontamination of spaces, robust and cost-effective PCR-based testing kits for detection of Coronavirus, high-quality sanitisers for microbial control (produced as per revised guidelines of World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control & Prevention USA), and ventilator systems for short-term stabilisation of COVID-19 patients (as per design specifications specially issued for combatting COVID-19 by the Medicines & Healthcare products Regulator Agency UK).

April 4, 2020