ESRI in talks with govt for tech help in Covid-19 pandemic fight

Encouraged by the experimental use of its technology in allocating beds, oxygen or ICU beds in Mumbai so that families do not have to run from one hospital to another, global end-to-end geospatial information (GSI) system major ESRI Technologies is in talks with the government to this further.

The purpose is to see if the states and the Centre can use its technology to tackle the issues arising from the pandemic. Can its satellite-based system monitor oxygen levels in hospitals, track the movement of oxygen tankers, monitor bed shortages, or even manage vaccination?

In Mumbai, the company worked with the municipal corporation to create an integrated platform, under which information about beds and oxygen was available and shared with specialised teams of the corporation on their mobile devices. Once a person was declared positive, the municipal corporation team, through a mobile app created by ESRI, received live information on how many and what kind of beds (with oxygen or not) were available in over 180 hospitals.

During the second wave when cases were surging in the city, this platform helped to speed up the process of matching patients and hospitals so there were no harried family of patients moving from one hospital to another.  

  

ESRI India Managing Director Agendra Kumar says its platform can monitor oxygen availability at the state, district, and hospital level. “Each hospital has an address that can be geo-coded. We can project demand and likely shortages. We can track oxygen tankers through our GIS system and integrate that with hospital requirements. These systems can be built in just days. Our platform has been used in Mumbai for the allocation of beds,” said Kumar.

Vaccination could also become easier. Kumar points out that state governments have information on the population at each block and city as well as the age profiles and the population density. “Based on this dashboard of information, one can decide how many vaccine centres you will need in an area, for what age group, and also keep a tab on how many have been vaccinated,” he said.

On contract tracing, ESRI’s technology could have been used, for example, at the Kumbh Mela festival to see how many pilgrims came from a big city, whether their numbers were large, and to calculate the chances of their contracting the disease and taking it home. This information in turn would act as a red alert for the local administration.

Apart from healthcare, ESRI is looking for a big play in telecom which it expects to boom with the advent of 5G. The company already has Reliance Jio, Airtel and BBNL as its customers. “They use our technology for various applications. We see a large potential with 5G,” said Kumar.

Reliance Jio uses ESRI technology for asset-mapping and its 20,000 field through mobile devices to monitor the network. It also used the GIS technology to capture each component of each phase of network construction, for fibre and wireless network equipment. GIS also covers over 50 per cent of the automated functions for Jio.

Airtel uses the GIS management system to map its towers and coverage capacity. It has also used it as a backbone of its customer offering known as ‘Know Your Network’ under which customers can view where the towers are located at a locality, state, and pin code level. In the power sector, ESRI is already a dominant player. Kumar says that 80 per cent of the electric distribution companies in the country user its technology for optimizing their distribution network. It also has over 20 city gas distribution firms as clients.

Some private sector real estate players also use its services for controlling their assets. Nonetheless, a large part of its business — 70 per cent — comes from government departments such as the Survey of India, the Geological Survey of India, forest departments, the water resources department, and state remote sensing departments.

Bridging the tech gap

• ESRI Technologies is seeing if its GIS technology can handle vaccine management, oxygen shortages, tracking oxygen tanks and finding empty beds
• It can also support contact tracing of Covid-19 patients 
• It sees a large business potential in the 5G roll out
• 70% of its business is from the government