Ropar, January 1
The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Ropar, has developed a first-of-its kind user-friendly app for recording and maintaining digital records of the nutritional status of children and women. It will help in improving health and nutrition status of children belonging to poor families, who attend government-run cregrave;ches known as anganwaris in the country.
To begin with, the project has been launched in Ropar district covering 872 anganwari centres of different villages to help over 1,200 workers.
IIT-Ropar Associate Prof Dr Puneet Goyal, coordinator of the app development project team, said, “IIT-Ropar’s researchers in collaboration with the district administration have developed the app named ndash; ‘SAMPAN’ ndash; which is a software for real-time monitoring of nutrition services at its anganwari centres (AWCs) and a reporting system to provide public access to data collected at the centres, in a bid to combat malnutrition.”
He said, “The app enables anganwari feed all nutrition-related data of children and their subsequent progress on a daily basis through their smartphones that help track their health in a more consistent and reliable manner.”
Dr Goyal said, “The app aims to help anganwari users, Child Development Project Officers (CDPOs) and other field-level implementers to record, calculate, and analyse data related to children malnourishment and BMI.”
“In addition to the app, accessible currently for authorised anganwari users of Rupnagar, we also provide a lighter version ‘SAMPAN-Lite’ that can be used by any anganwari worker in the country. A web-dashboard with data visualisation and analytics is also developed by our team for the CDPOs,” he added.
“The country has one of the worst rates of child under nutrition in the world. In 2020, India was ranked 94th out of 107 countries in the Global Hunger Index. These anganwaris, whose number is over 13 lakh in India, have been established under the four-decade-old programme called the Integrated Child Development Services that aims to improve the health and nutrition status of children,” Dr Goyal added.
Dr Goyal said, “Undergraduates, who contributed in developing the app are Sahil Verma, Sagalpreet Singh, Aman Palariya, Akhil Arya and Dileep Sharma.”