Revolutionizing Medical Screening in the Times of COVID-19

We talked to Anushka Purohit of CoronAI on how they’re using technology to help healthcare practitioners monitor patients remotely.

First of all, how are you and your family doing in these COVID-19 times? 

Anushka Purohit: Thank you for asking – thankfully, very well! Hope the same is true for you.

Tell us about you, your career, how you founded CoronAI.

Anushka Purohit: Anupam and I, the co-founders of CoronAI, are both aspiring Engineering students. We met on exchange at UC Berkeley where the pandemic hit and wanted to use our education and privilege to make a difference. After watching a viral video of a nurse from NYC sharing her devastating experience as a front-line worker, we decided to create technology to help our doctors and nurses monitor patients remotely.

How does CoronAI innovate? 

Anushka Purohit: We take inspiration from the technology we are familiar with and re-present it into a new use case. Combining our experiences in the software and hardware realm, we are able to innovate, create a vision and then successfully execute it! 

How the coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?

Anushka Purohit: In fact, our business is to combat the occurrences of phenomena like the virus. With our technology that allows for remote monitoring and medical screening of lungs real-time, doctors and nurses are able to protect themselves and their families from contracting the virus. With CoronAI, we hope to transform the medical diagnostics industry and reshape its experience. 

Did you have to make difficult choices, and what are the lessons learned?

Anushka Purohit: Most definitely – it was a difficult choice to dedicate our time and effort on this project simultaneously with our academics. We did not want to only show half the effort or leave the project midway, and dedicated a lot of time, effort and thought into the creation of our company! We’ve learnt that this is the attitude we, as a youth and the future of the world, have to keep. We are so privileged and lucky to get the education that we have, and it is only right we use it to give back to the community and help others in the world. 

How do you deal with stress and anxiety, how do you project yourself and Anushka Purohit in the future?

Anushka Purohit: We project ourselves as constant innovators, bettering ourselves and our product. In the future, we hope to bring our device to rural villages and towns, providing those living there with better access to healthcare and a more concrete diagnosis system.

Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?

Anushka Purohit: The existing solutions include MRI machines and CT scanning machines, which are bulky, expensive and limited. These machines are mainly in hospitals, and use different technology for scanning. Therefore, we do not have any competitors – our technology is proprietary; we use electrical impedance tomography. We are tapping into this market not as a replacement mechanism, but as a product to support existing machinery.

Your website?

coronai.org