IT Correspondent
New Delhi, July 24:
A senior delegation from Israel’s Directorate of Defence Research and Development will visit shortly visit India, to develop new and rapid coronavirus tests in cooperation with Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO).
The Israeli delegation will work with the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi and will coordinate with DRDO officials. The joint project is led by PM Narendra Modi’s Principal Scientific Advisor K Vijay Raghavan and Israel’s Directorate of Defence Research and Development’s Head Dani Gold.
The delegation plans to test four different technologies for detecting coronavirus: sound waves, breathalyzers based on terahertz waves, isothermic identification and checking polyamino acids. The first phase of testing of these technologies was done in Israel and the last stage will now be carried out in India. The Israeli team would be in India for about a week and a half, official sources here said.
The Israeli and Indian scientists will carry out 4,000 to 5,000 tests of each technology in India to determine if they can work. The Israeli team will also bring aid packages to India on the flight, including sanitising and disinfection equipment to protect medical staff, along with ventilators, which received special authorization to be sent out of Israel.
The new technologies are meant to allow for rapid coronavirus testing, in some cases in a matter of minutes. One of the them is a new COVID-19 test that uses polyamino acids to produce a result in 30 minutes. Real-time testing is expected to allow the economy to open again.
A second, inexpensive biochemical test can be used at home and gives a result in 30 minutes. The third technolog uses artificial intelligence to listen to a person’s voice and determine if he or she has first stage COVID-19. It plays on the fact COVID-19 attacks the respiratory system. One could even do the diagnosis through a cell phone.
The fourth method is a breath analyser. One can breathe into a tube…then the tube will be put into a machine which uses terahertz radio frequencies and an algorithm to tell if the person who breathed has the virus.
