Kalady students develop low-cost hand sanitizer to fight against COVID-19

Kochi: As the novel Coronavirus infection continues to spread across India, the student start-up in the Fab Lab of Adi Shankara Institute of Engineering And Technology, Kalady has developed a low-cost pressure-based hand sanitizer dispenser and a website to aid the fight against Coronavirus.

The concept and design of the website www.asietcare.in/vadakkekara was developed by Anuroop KB, Assistant Professor of Adi Shankara College, in association with the Vadakkekara Panchayat in Ernakulam District for coordinating volunteering activities of a panchayat. The website helps the officials and the public to identify the registered volunteers and access their services with a call or message. Through this website, a person living in the panchayat can access a trained volunteer assigned in their ward to deliver the service they required.

The student entrepreneurs came up with an innovation of pressure-based sanitizer dispensers. The manual and automated sensor-based sanitizer dispensers are already available in the market. The costs and the power consumption or battery, which is hardly available during the lockdown, create crisis for these dispensers.

Considering these issues, Anuroop along with students Abhinav Subhash Jayakrishnan, Gokul Krishnan S, Paul Baiju, Deepu Ajay, Manu Mohan, Sreehari Soman, Sreejith S Nair and Suman Menon, conceptualised the idea of a simple sanitizer dispenser that can be easily made at home using a plastic bottle, tube, and a paper clip. Though this is a Do It Yourself Hand Sanitizer Dispenser, the students are also manufacturing the product at the fab lab of the College at Kalady. They will be soon installing this in public spaces. The estimated cost of this product is only Rs 50.