Intugine is Helping Government Monitor Home-Quarantined Individuals

To ensure strict compliance of social distancing guidelines, a Bangalore-based start-up, Intugine Technologies is helping government officials monitor a large number of home-quarantined individuals as the nation ramps up its efforts to contain the COVID-19 spread. The most important part of their solution is that it does not require the installation of any mobile application and can work even on feature phones. Using SMS, the user consent is recorded and the tracking is initiated.

Already live in five states including Goa where the company has launched a mobile application Covid Locator to suit the demographic. The state governments are using the solution to monitor COVID-19 quarantines in specific regions, the solution is helping officials monitor tens of thousands of cases on a single dashboard. This has helped reduce the workload on the ground teams significantly while ensuring a more effective way of ensuring adherence. The dashboard is accessible to the officials and the COVID-19 control room to facilitate real-time decision making and monitor the home-quarantined cases. The location data is stored securely on cloud servers, thereby ensuring that the privacy of individuals is not compromised. The tracking stops automatically after the quarantine period ends. The start-up is in talks with government officials to deploy the solution in other states of the country as well.

Intugine is a Logistics Technology company, providing real-time tracking and supply chain optimization solutions to the likes of Philips, Flipkart, Mahindra Logistics, Arvind Mills, Arvind Fashion and many more. Intugine's end-to-end platform includes route planning & vehicle allocation, digital indenting, in-warehouse tracking, in-transit tracking, electronic PoD, and data-driven planning. Intugine's Location Intelligence platform already tracks lakhs of truck movements every month and is repurposed to track the home quarantines in the light of the COVID-19 crisis. Intugine tweaked their logistics solutions, including their 'Mobile Number Tracking' solution to help government authorities track movements of the home-quarantined people and detect any possible breaches. The tech works on basic phones as well, covering 95%+ of the Indian Mobile Phones.

The founding team behind Intugine includes Harshitv Shrivastava, Ayush Agrawal, and Mrinal Rai, who come from IIT Kharagpur and SRCC. They raised an undisclosed amount from IPV and some angel investors in 2019.

To maintain mandated confidentiality, the names of some states have not been mentioned.

The founders stressed on the importance of private ventures backing the government in these troublesome times. As they put it, effective use of technology can go a long way in containing the situation.

Harshit Shrivastava: With social distancing being the only effective option to contain COVID-19, we believe that an effective monitoring solution can be of great help at this point. With our location intelligence platform, we are enabling authorities to monitor thousands of quarantines at once, in an effective, least intrusive and scalable manner.

Ayush Agrawal: Our logistics platform fits seamlessly in providing a solution to the COVID-19 monitoring. As we got positive feedbacks in detecting the breaches of home quarantine, we started reaching out to multiple state governments for large-scale implementation.

Mrinal Rai: Once the lockdown ends it’s going to be very crucial to identify COVID hotspots based on population movement and density and do effective contact tracing to avoid the next wave of infection. With our location intelligence algorithms and data mining technologies, we are building tools to do such analysis and tracing at scale.