NUST develops bilingual app for corona screening

Islamabad : 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 app for Android, 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 screen for COVID-19, 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, 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 Centres 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).