The problem Y-tality solves

In India, more than 50% of people don't reach a hospital on time when they get a heart attack. More than 60% of our ambulances are ill equipped to diagnose conditions, which means the patients vital parameters are anyone's guess until they reach the hospital.

Moreover, with the advent of Motorcycle ambulances to deal with traffic, this has worsened since they carry no diagnostic tools. What is the need of the hour is a cheap, portable, easy to use solution for their diagnostics needs. Patients who are stabilised before being transported have a 8X higher chance of survival.

We built such a system and a companion app to enable quick and easy diagnostics anytime, anywhere.

Challenges we ran into

Any medical diagnostic system is incomplete without a means of peering into the human body, since XRays and NMRI's are either too expensive, too cumbersome or too dangerous to be portable. We turned our attention to Thermal Cameras which are normally used for surveillance purposes. We reasoned (and it was backed by research) that thermal cameras can pick up heat signatures under the skin and thus detect concussions and internal bleeding.

There were virtually no data sets on this, moreover the thermal camera we had outputted everything in greyscale. Using opencv and a bit of ingenuity we were able to overcome these problems.

Another issue was the lack of a mic- we planned on making a digital stethoscope but we needed a powerful compact clip on mic that was compatible with a PC, the mic we got wasn't. We used a pulse sensor to make up for that shortcoming.