Fast Medical Supply Chain

We provide high speed delivery of vaccines, O2, and other essential supplies during the pandemic.

We use drones with modified miniature engines for higher range, special fuselage for space for pressurized O2, electricity-independent dry ice refrigeration, and payload manipulators. Flight scheduling software, scalable to some of the largest organizations, routes our drones automatically.  A large cluster of villages and hard to reach areas can be served quickly from a central hub. 

A large vaccine porfolio (including mRNA needing cryogenics) can be stored at a hub, thawed locally, and sent to vaccination centers located even 20 Km away, enabling large sections of rural/peri-urban Indian populace to be served. Similarly O2/other supplies.

Our solution expands the reach of health care, to rural and hard-to-reach areas. A large vaccine portfolio, and emergency O2/medical supplies, can be used, expanding the choices for health care authorities, aiding their ability to handle the pandemic.

We address high speed last mile delivery of a variety of medical supplies - all kinds of vaccines, emergency oxygen, ..., related to Covid-19 in India.

This national emergency, is known worldwide. Almost a billion people live in areas, with poor accessibility and health infrastructure. Vaccination has to be done on a war footing, at a pace never done before in the nation - 2+ billion doses given as fast as possible - existing cold-chains/production need huge augmentation. Similarly testing - e.g taking RT-PCR samples for analysis at central facilities, from such areas.

Every section of society has to be served - to prevent mutations from spreading further. Our solution enables remote areas, with poor connectivity, to be served with a variety of different vaccines, whose mix can be determined by timely supply chain and pandemic incidence events on a continuous basis. Emergency medical care at even urban hospitals, is also facilitated by the ability to supply limited quantities of oxygen.

A conventional method of having people come to urban or district centers to get vaccinated, can cause the virus to spread further, and our solution is an alternative.

There are already nationwide calls from the Govt for such initiatives.

We implement a medical cold supply chain with specialized software and hardware. Some details are at:

Solution Details

• We use drones with special miniature engines for higher range, special fuselage with space for pressurized O2, and payload pickup-unload manipulators. Advanced electromechanical systems with fast dynamics, incorporating high power magnets directly into the design of mechanisms, are used. Dynamics is partly decoupled from kinematics using our methods.
• Electricity-free dry-ice technology enables cost-effective in-flight cold-chain temperature-control.
• Flight scheduling software, scalable to the largest organizations, routes our drones automatically. The kernel software has been tested, on a section of one of the world's largest railroads. High performance/low power FPGA's enable the drone to fly semi automatically.

The increased payload, and range enables a large cluster of villages and hard to reach areas to be served quickly from a central hub, near a major airport.

Vaccines (even those requiring cryogenics - mRNA) can be stored at the hub, thawed, and sent to distant vaccination centers, enabling large sections of rural and peri-urban populace to be served.

The same facility can ship 1000+ L of oxygen and other emergency supplies  to hospitals temporarily overloaded with high case load, as happened in India in April 2021.

We target rural and urban areas with limited medical infrastructure worldwide, affected by the pandemic. Already rural areas in some parts of India, have outstripped urban areas in the virus' spread.

Getting medical facilities by road to villages and semi urban areas is quite difficult, and slow. The large migrant population (100's of millions) is another major challenge, and few scalable and quickly deployable solutions exist. 

Our solution attempts to alleviate one part of the problem, by providing high speed logistics. These can be used both to convey vaccines (even m-RNA requiring refrigeration), and medical supplies, as well as pick up samples like RT-PCR from remote stations. This facility is required on a war footing in this pandemic, to prevent the pandemic and mutations from spreading worldwide.

Cooperation of the local population, to get vaccinated, is facilitated, through India's vast network of primary health care centers, where staff exist, but modern cold supply chain facilities are quite limited. In addition, we intend working with non-governmental organizations, to reach out to large portions of the populace.

In this pandemic, accurate information collection and dissemination is important. High speed drone logistics enables samples to be quickly collected nationwide, and sent to a central laboratory, for analysis.

We offer a quick, cost effective last-mile cold supply chain, for Covid-19/similar pandemics.The vaccine mix is flexible (including m-RNA), and can adapt to current shortages - local vaccine manufacturing/distribution has to be augmented.

Multiple kinds of vaccines can be deployed, but -70degree cryogenics is needed only at major hubs. Dry ice  preserves the vaccines after thawing for enough time to vaccinate an end-point health care center's entire population.

Poorly served rural and hard to reach areas, scattered and with only 1000-2000 people, are the initial targeted beneficiaries, and the drones will typically have multiple drops on a sortie.

Many parts of the solution are ready and/or have been tested separately, in challenging situations. The drones are ready, and so is the dry ice technology. Kernels of the required sophisticated scheduling have been tested for the railroad system, one of the largest in the world (complete optimization is beyond the state of art) - we have publications in ITSC2018, and elsewhere.

We are waiting to get airway clearances and funding to deploy our pilot, in a area north of Bengaluru, with about 150,000 people targeted.

The use of drones with specially modified power plants efficiently recharging batteries, significantly increases range, and allows reaching significantly large areas from a central facility having possibly cryogenics for long term vaccine storage. These modifications are based on configuration dependent reactive storage of energy in electromagnetic fields. Configurable lossless exchange of electromagnetic energy and kinetic energy enables faster and more responsive dynamics, compared to conventional mechanisms driven by actuators (see patents) - mass can be reduced by 10-30%.

The drone fuselage modifications, with carbon fiber Oxygen storage chambers (upto 40 bar) embedded, expands the kinds of payload deliverable to include medical gases, without introducing excessive mass.

Vaccine is preserved during flight using dry ice made without electicity.

The sophisticated scheduling software scales nationwide, and incorporates non-probabilistic representations of uncertainty in pandemic incidence, and associated vaccine requirements. In another incarnation, the same software has been tested on parts of a large railroad system. We do not make all parameters simultaneously max/min, but can take arbitrary correlations between them into account, while retaining computational tractability.

We have won National Awards for our work - amongst the best commercializable research from Indian Research Institutions. One Ph.D thesis was recommended for ACM India Doctoral Dissertation award by IIIT-Bengaluru.

We are in a pilot stage, targeting 150,000 people.

We plan to scale up to 10's of millions soon (within 1 year).

Further scale up depends on the results from the pilot.

Primary Indicator: 

• Number of people vaccinated/treated, over a time period, graded by the difficulty of reaching their locations (operations in remote locations get more credit).

Secondary Indicators:

• Unit cost, all inclusive
• Economic Metric - % of economic activity resumed based on growth rates, labor usage, ...

For the pilot, we have the equivalent of 10 full time staff.

Vaccination is a well accepted medical practice throughout society. The current bottleneck is both in vaccine supply and cold supply chain logistics.

We have demonstrated portions of the technology in other situations already.

We at IIIT-Bengaluru, have extensive experience in scheduling software, having worked on some of the largest railroad systems. Specifically, we have been session chairs on INFORMS sessions on Covid supply chains in 2020, and earlier in 2019 on related topics. We are also speaking at the INFORMS 2021 Health Care Conference.

4PI (Forth Paradigm Institute), is a leading Indian institute in Information Technology, and has extensive experience in drones, amongst other items.

4th Paradigm Institute

NAL and IIT-Kanpur are pioneers in drone technology in India, and currently have some of the most sophisticated drones available in India.

Our dry ice technology is quite innovative, and has been tested.

The team is from all over India, and has been driven in part by women graduates.

Our technology is quite sophisticated, and we need access to world class engineering skills.

For drone solutions to scale and be cost effective for India's needs, long range and endurance are essential. As such petrol driven engines are attractive, provided they can be weight reduced, and our technology achieves this. We would like to discuss our technology in detail with experts.

The cold chain integrity is maintained using dry ice packs produced without any electrical power, another technology innovation.

Our flight scheduling software has been applied (in another incarnation) to a large portion of the railroad system. The algorithms used have to scale to a national level - a grand computational challenge. We would like to discuss our approach with experts.

We want to discuss our sophisticated technology, with experts as described above.

We need guidance on Product/Service distribution (part of this is marketing).

All at MIT, Harvard, and others - faculty, centers, initiatives.

We have been selected by the Indian Prime Minister's office for a cold supply chain for Covid-19.

We are currently in the pilot phase, and the prize would be very helpful for us, in addressing this international emergency.

Once the pilot is demonstrated, a commercial venture will be created.