The Ministry of Education’s Innovation Cell (MIC) announced the National Innovation Contest (NIC) 2020 in February 2020. The National Innovation Contest provides a 360-degree cycle of learning and understanding of the process of innovation and start-up. It is designed such that each team will traverse a path from problem identification and ideation to building a business model and finally entering the phase of Enterprise development in a time period of one year.

One Team (comprising 6 students) from MCA II year, School of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Hyderabad (UoH), qualified for the finals of the NIC 2020. This stage is the financial assessment by the Ministry of Education Innovation Cell. The team was amongst the top 127 finalists from all over India who made it to Level IV (final stage).

The following are the details of the prototype and the team.

Prototype Title: Secure EHR- Digitalization of Medical Records via Blockchain

IIC ID: IC201811269

Prototype ID: 64789

Team:

  1. Aayush Pandey (Team Leader), 2. Sushmita Kujur, 3. Ashutosh Srivastava, 4. Lucky Tolani, 5. Atharva Kesarwani, 6. Raunak Singh.

The team was selected under the theme –Healthcare and Biomedical devices with the prototype “Secure EHR (Electronic Health Record),” a unique system. The team developed a prototype which is a decentralized, immutable, secure, blockchain-powered system, and this system is an automated information system. It provides two-layer security through blockchain and the portability of health records. The system will verify the global state of the blockchain, and the user query is submitted to the block chain through a service-based API. Further, blockchain will send the request to other peers for consensus.

The event was held in four levels:

  • Level 1 (Idea). The ideas should be at Technological Readiness Level (TRL) – 0 to 2.
  • Level 2 (Proof of Concept). The PoC should be at Technological Readiness Level (TRL) – 3.
  • Level 3 (Prototype). The Prototype/Innovations should be from Technological Readiness Level (TRL) –4 to 73.
  • Level 4 (Financial Assessment by Ministry of Education)

 The following are the Technological Readiness Level (TRL) details and the prototype evaluated with these measures.

i.      TRL 0: Idea – Unproven concept, no testing got performed.

ii.      TRL 1: Basic Research – Principles postulated observed but no experimental proof available.

iii.    TRL 2: Technology formulation – Concept and application have been formulated.

iv.     TRL 3: Applied Research – First Laboratory test completed; Proof of Concept.

v.      TRL 4: Small-scale prototype built in a laboratory environment.

vi.     TRL 5: Large-scale prototype tested in the intended environment.

vii.   TRL 6: Prototype system tested in an intended environment close to expected performance.

viii.  TRL 7: Demonstration system operating in an operational environment at a pre-commercial scale.

ix.    TRL 8: First of a kind commercial system. Manufacturing issues solved.

x.      TRL 9: Full commercial application, the technology available for consumers.

The University of Hyderabad, Institutional Innovation Council (UoH-IIC) congratulated the students team and the Faculty Coordinator for making into the finals of NIC -2020