Tackling bottlenecks in the blood supply chain in India’s rural areas is vital to eradicate maternal mortality. Kochi-based Bagmo’s gadget displays the temperature of blood bags, and aims to cut back wastageand improve logistics. Anaemia impacts as many as half of all pregnant women in low-revenue and middle-income nations. In line with World BloodVitals health Organisation, India contributes to about 80 p.c of pregnancy-associated deaths attributable to anaemia in South Asia. And most of those deaths may be prevented with the availability of blood. Enter Kochi-based Bagmo Pvt Ltd, which is working in the direction of prevention of deaths during pregnancy due to non-availability of blood in rural India. Founded in March 2017 by IIT-Madras alumnus Ashfaq Ashraf and his buddies, Anas Dalinatakam and Arshad KA, the staff has developed a blood bag monitoring gadget: Bagmo. The machine screens the temperature of blood baggage during transportation and storage. The B2B firm goals to scale back wastage at blood storage centres, and enhance logistics and communication issues.

After finishing his MTech in Clinical Engineering, BloodVitals monitor Ashfaq went on to do a fellowship programme in maternal and child well being. This was a Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC) social innovation programme in Odisha. "Blood needed to be transferred from a district hospital 60 km away," he says. In 2017, the corporate obtained Rs 47 lakh funds from BIRAC, underneath the biotech ignition grant, and started working on the concept. "We collaborated with Christian Medical College, Vellore, to develop the product," Ashfaq says. How does the machine work? Whenever a donor donates blood, painless SPO2 testing data is entered in Bagmo's cloud, utilizing an online application. Once the donated blood has undergone tests, the three parts - plasma, blood cells, and platelets - are separated into baggage. A radio-frequency identification (RFID) card is connected to each of these luggage. Before the bag is placed into the mother financial institution or refrigerator, the RFID is scanned using the Bagmo system.

The cloud shops the unique ID and the refrigerator that stores the bag. Next time, every time there is a requirement for blood, all of the hospital or user has to do is enter the details within the cloud. Bagmo, or the 'Blood bAG MOnitoring' machine, will alert the customers about which bag is match for use and during which refrigerator it has been saved. Bagmo makes use of algorithms to store all this information. Currently in pilot stage, the machine can be utilized to observe blood in a blood bank refrigerator or container. The machine monitors the temperature of each blood bag while it's being transported and stored. Ashfaq, 31, had five years of experience of working with corporate hospitals and startups, earlier than he began his entrepreneurial journey. He has labored with the Ministry of Health underneath the technical help of Unicef, as a cold chain consultant for the vaccination provide chain. Anas previously worked in a Research and Development Institute for two years, before joining Bagmo.

He is the Technical Head at the company. Arshad left the company in 2017 as he needed to pursue a master’s degree. The founding workforce additionally recruited 10 freshers to work for Bagmo. Dr Joy Mammen, of Transfusion Medicine at CMC Vellore, mentors Team Bagmo. The startup started its journey in Bengaluru. However, "getting quality manpower on a restricted budget was a problem in a metro", Ashfaq says. To solve this downside, Bagmo shifted to Kochi and was incubated in Maker Village. Bagmo has received assist from Kerala Development Innovation Strategy Council and CMC Vellore. Bagmo is not generating any revenue at present. "Revenue is expected from selling the system," Ashfaq says. However, he refused to disclose pricing particulars at this stage. Through the use of Bagmo, every hospital will spend Rs 50 further on each bag. The startup will provide two Bagmo devices (one for the mother bank and one other for the container used for transportation) to every hospital along with software utilization licence for a year. The medical gadget startup is concentrating on blood banks and blood storage centres initially, and will then give attention to different industries. According to speculate India, the Indian medical gadgets market size is expected to reach $50 million by 2025. Although there is not any Indian startup competing immediately with Bagmo, just a few worldwide players like Biolog ID (France, at-home blood monitoring SATO America, BloodVitals SPO2 and BloodVitals insights Terso Solutions (US) have related choices. Bagmo acquired one other grant this year for conducting pilot study under BIRAC’s SBIRI scheme. It's in talks for equity-based investments with Axilor Ventures.

Certain constituents within the blood have an effect on the absorption of gentle at various wavelengths by the blood. Oxyhemoglobin absorbs gentle more strongly within the infrared region than within the pink area, whereas hemoglobin exhibits the reverse behavior. Therefore, BloodVitals health highly oxygenated blood with a excessive concentration of oxyhemoglobin and a low focus of hemoglobin will are inclined to have a excessive ratio of optical transmissivity within the purple region to optical transmissivity within the infrared area. These alternating portions are amplified after which segregated by sampling units working in synchronism with the purple/infrared switching, so as to offer separate indicators on separate channels representing the pink and infrared mild transmission of the physique structure. After low-move filtering to take away signal parts at or above the switching frequency, every of the separate indicators represents a plot of optical transmissivity of the body construction at a specific wavelength versus time. AC element brought about only by optical absorption by the blood and various on the pulse frequency or heart fee of the organism.