IIT Madras start-ups’ efforts to develop ‘Portable Hospital Unit’ funded by Wells Fargo

With a contagious disease such as COVID-19, it is essential to have smart health infrastructure to screen, contain and treat people. Unlike urban areas, rural areas do not have plenty of existing infrastructure that can be converted to hospitals. There it is difficult to construct buildings from scratch as the requirement is immediate.

Wells Fargo, an American multinational financial services company, is providing funding support to an IIT Madras-incubated start-up called Modulus Housing to tackle this problem. The startup has developed a portable hospital unit that can be installed anywhere within two hours by four people.

Called ‘MediCAB,’ it is a decentralised approach to detect, screen, identify, isolate and treat COVID-19 patients in their local communities through these portable microstructures. It is foldable and is composed of four zones – a doctor’s room, an isolation room, a medical room/ ward and a twin-bed ICU, maintained at negative pressure.

The major advantage of decentralised micro infrastructures is that these can be used across the nation. These microstructures can be shifted to rural India. Hence, this can be one-shot two-kill scenarios and can be put to good use even after COVID-19 is eliminated from the country.