DST selects Bengaluru start-up for developing COVID risk assessment app

Team Udayavani, Jul 28, 2020, 4:49 PM IST

New Delhi: The Centre for Augmenting WAR with COVID-19 Health Crisis (CAWACH), an initiative by the Department of Science and Technology (DST), has selected a Bengaluru based start-up to develop a covid risk assessment mobile application, an official statement said on Tuesday.

The ”Lyfas” COVID score has been developed by start-up Acculi Labs with support from the DST and will detect the possible infection in an asymptomatic individual to prioritise the conventional testing queue as well as carry out a risk assessment of an asymptomatic individual to become symptomatic and risk assessment of an asymptomatic individual for recovery.

According to Acculi Labs, Lyfas is a clinical-grade, non-invasive, digital functional biomarker smartphone tool for screening, early detection, root cause analysis, acute event risk assessment, prognosis, and home monitoring of chronic diseases which they have repurposed to ”Lyfas COVID score”.

CAWACH, an initiative by the National Science & Technology Entrepreneurship Development Board (NSTEDB), DST, is supporting market-ready innovations for the control of COVID-19 and startup ideas to address associated challenges.

In March, the DST collaborated to support technologies that are solving COVID problems. Acculi Labs was selected after several rounds of screening for a solution towards mass screening.

Lyfas is an Android application in which, when one keeps the index finger on the rear camera of a mobile phone for 5 minutes, captures the capillary pulse and blood volume change and derives 95 biomarkers with proprietary algorithms and signal processing techniques.

It uses the power of smartphone processor and smartphone sensors to capture a bunch of body signals. The signals are subsequently processed on the principle of Photoplethysmography(PPG), Photo Chromatography(PCG), Arterial Photoplethysmography(APPG), mobile spirometry, and Pulse Rate Variability (PRV).

Lyfas then provides cardio-respiratory, cardio-vascular, hematology, hemorheology, neurology based parameters that are capable of tracking minute pathophysiological changes in the body. These changes are further profiled into organ system-wide response.

The technology is focused on population screening, monitoring of quarantined individuals, and surveillance at the community spreading phase.

It has been proved to detect asymptomatic individuals with an accuracy of 92 per cent, the specificity of 90 per cent, and a sensitivity of 92 per cent in a study conducted with Medanta Medicity hospital.

Witnessing the success of the study, Medanta ethics committee has approved it for a larger population study. This study is currently registered in Clinical Trials Registry- India (CTRI) and is acknowledged by the World Health Organisation (WHO), the statement said.

The clinical trials and regulatory proceedings are expected to be completed by the end of September, after which the testing facility will be made available for the general public.

While AarogyaSetu works on contact tracing where one has to enter your symptoms, Lyfas is a proper medical screening test which purely depends upon test results, it added.

It has received a grant of Rs 30 lakh from DST and is now virtually supported by IIT Madras, Healthcare Technology Innovation Centre (HTIC), MedTech Incubator.

“Inexpensive, accessible, point-of-care smart phone based diagnostics is a powerful tool that would tremendously help in screening the high risk cases, sustained monitoring of quarantined cases and general surveillance,” said Ashutosh Sharma, secretary, DST said.

“Lyfas is an interesting example of the rising power of technology startups in innovating relevant and creative solutions for the emergent challenges with speed and efficacy,” he added.