Intellectual Property India gives patent for non-invasive ‘nadi parisothanai’ device

Team of techs & doc from Anna Univ & Govt Siddha Med Coll design ML-based non-invasive device to pick-up & process 'naadi' for error-free diagnosis. Patent granted by Intellectual Property India. Device to make diagnosis easier, faster & more accurate. Aim to make kit available to siddha practitioners & common man at affordable cost. 20 sensors used, 5 siddha physicians to prepare dataset & validate system. Patent to be submitted to AYUSH for approval.

For the first time, a doctor of Government Siddha Medical College here and a team of technocrats from Anna University’s Regional Campus, Tirunelveli, have jointly designed and developed a Machine Learning-based non-invasive device for picking-up ‘naadi’ (flow of blood through artery) through sensors and processing it within no time for error-free diagnosis of health issues from which the patient is suffering.

 After a series of mandatory verifications, Intellectual Property India has given patent for non-invasive ‘nadi parisothanai’ device for prognosis or diagnosis of diseases from the after-effect of electrical impulse in the heart in the radial artery’, jointly developed by the team.

 “The objective behind this first-of-its-kind project is to ensure error-free diagnosis of health issues within a couple of minutes by digitally analyzing the patient’s ‘naadi’ picked-up through sensors. If we can make this kit available to the siddha medical practitioners or even a common man at affordable cost, accurate diagnosis of the diseases and deciding the right line of treatment using siddha formulations will be error-free, easier and faster,” says G. Subhash Chandran, Professor of Government Siddha Medical College, Palayamkottai, and State Nodal Officer, Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav - AYUSH Celebration, who is a part of this team.

 While allopathic system of medicine employs a range of manual, mechanical and radiological investigations for diagnosis, ‘nadi’, the flow of blood through veins, provides the basis for the diagnosis of health disorders in the siddha medical system. Naturally, the wrong understanding or reading of ‘nadi’ by a siddha practitioner would go awry in pinpointing the exact disorder or disease from which the patient is suffering. And, the line of treatment being administered based on the wrong reading of ‘nadi’ will sure to make things worse for the patient, he says.

 Hence, to address this serious issue, Dr. Subhash Chandran discussed this problem with late G. Sakthinathan, formerly Dean, Anna University’s Regional Campus, Tirunelveli in 2015 on combining the centuries-old Siddha medicine’s ‘nadi’ with modern electronic components for fabricating a digital system for diagnosis without any error and that too within a couple of minutes.

 “Like the predictions being done by the weather forecasters by comparing lakhs of earlier weather systems stored electronically in a super computer with the weather condition prevailing today, we are comparing the ‘nadi’ of a patient with already digitally stored ‘nadi’ taken from over a thousand healthy and unhealthy persons for rightly diagnosing the disease,” Dr. Subhash Chandran explains.

 After picking-up the ‘nadi’ (vibration caused by blood flow in the radial artery), it is digitised in the personal computer and compared with the already stored data of over a thousand medical conditions of the human beings, all obtained earlier .