The General Sir John Kotelawala Defence University (KDU) has taken several initiatives of Research and Development to combat the COVID-19 pandemic and to mitigate its impact.
These initiatives are diverse and focus several areas of importance, spanning from improving people’s health, diagnosis of SARS-COV 2 infections and developing biomedical equipment to developing strategies to face post-impact of the pandemic.
The university has already established the COVID-19 testing facility and is currently undertaking the testing of patient-samples, not only from its own hospital (UH-KDU) but from other relevant institutes under the Health Ministry.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, several members of the Faculty of Engineering, Faculty of Computing and Faculty of Medicine, KDU working collaboratively in teams, brought various inventions such as producing timely needed medical equipment, disinfecting items and medical assistance computer applications etc.
Some of these items which have been completed in production were demonstrated to the Defence Secretary Maj. Gen. (Retd) Kamal Gunaratne on April 21, 2020.
Among those are ventilators of two designs, a UV air purifier, a Robot Medical Assistant, and a software application for long distance patient-doctor communication. The product development cost was Rs 100,000.
(LI)