Talk Title : Genesis of a Dream: Health Care Technologies for a Billion

Speaker - Prof. Dipankar Bandyopadhyay,Professor, IIT Guwahati

Abstract of the talk

The vision of improving quality of global health requires diagnostic facilities accessible even for the last mile population. The conventional diagnostic facilities face limitations with institution based centralized operation, costly installation-operating-maintenance, expert dependency in analysis, and limited accessibility. Recently, a flurry of research activities has been observed in the design and development of user operated ultra-fast, affordable, and portable point-of-care-testing (POCT) devices to bridge this gap and provide information on the quality of health at the patients site before consulting doctors. The machine learning and artificial intelligence tools integrated to such devices even guide the user to take care of critical parameters. For example, the glucometer, pregnancy kit, weighing machine, or pressure monitoring device are some examples, which are very successful even at the commercial levels. However, there is an urgent need to develop such POCT devices specific to many other biomarkers such as amylase, lipase, T3, T4, TSH, sodium, potassium, hemoglobin, protein/fat markers, urea, uric acid, and creatinine in various body fluids such as serum, sebum, urine, saliva, or tear. A complete healthcare solution can be thought of development of such POCT technologies alongside the development of, (i) software for analysis, (ii) manpower for primary care, and (iii) a health management system, around the existing healthcare ecosystem. In bits and pieces, we are able to join many of these points, which will be the center point of this talk on the dream “Healthcare for a Billion”

About the Speaker

Dr. Dipankar Bandyopadhyay completed his B.Sc in Chemistry and B.Tech in Chemical Engineering from Calcutta University, M.Tech and PhD from IIT Kanpur. Presently, he is a Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, Head, Centre for Nanotechnology and is the PI of the upcoming Centre for Excellence on the Research and Development of Nanoelectronic Theranostic Devices at IIT Guwahati. He is the recipient of NCL's Prof. K Venkataraman CHEMCON Award, Gandhian Young Technology award 2016 and 2019, and BIRAC-SRISTI Appreciation Award 2017. He is a nominated mem-ber of ACS, RSC, and IIChE.