No More Needles & Blood! Bhubaneswar Start-Up’s Gadget Can Do Path Tests Without Poking You

Bhubaneswar: Trypanophobic and often caught giving that annoying smile, doing the coy squirm at the sight of a needle? Here is something that can save you from the jittery feeling. A Bhubaneswar-based startup claims to have come up with a non-invasive pathological gadget, EzeCheck, to detect sugar, anaemia and diagnose liver, kidney and lung problems and deliver results in just a few seconds without taking even a drop of blood from your body!

“We have already sold around 70 to 80 devices in Business-to-Business mode following a pilot launch in April. We are expecting a sale of over 500 more devices after a pan-India launch in the next one or two months by Indian Oil that has supported this initiative,” said Founder and CEO of EzeRx Partha Pratim Das Mahapatra.

A native of Medinipur in West Bengal, Partha started EzeRX, which stands for ‘Easy for prescription,’ in 2018 in Kolkata and later moved to Odisha, which he said had the right environment and facilities to give shape to their idea of providing easy and painless diagnostic solutions for identifying primary health parameters at an early stage. Easy to use and affordability are the other parameters that he has been working on.

“We got the funds and lab facilities at KIIT Technology Business Incubator (KIIT-TBI) for building a working prototype. We have been operating and manufacturing the gadget here for two years,” he said.

Partha, who worked in the corporate sector with focus on healthcare analytics, said that anaemia is a major public health problem in India. “My mother had to undergo heart surgery at the age of 37 since she was anaemic. In India, two out of every three women are anaemic. However, this problem is not being addressed properly. We focus on the child through Anganwadi and pregnant women, but not on adolescent girls and those in the pre-pregnancy stage,” he said.

This was the trigger for Partha, who felt the need to come up with a device that can detect anaemia with a technology that any person (unskilled or semi-skilled) can use. “Pathology tests need experienced manpower and cost time and money. We started with a haemoglobin test and then shifted focus to other diseases – liver and lungs, kidney and diabetes,” he said.

EzeCheck has five testing parameters – haemoglobin to detect anaemia; bilirubin to predict liver problem; oxygen saturation level to check the functioning of the lungs; creatinine level for early signs of whether kidneys are working properly and blood sugar for diabetes.

“We picked the B-to-B mode as we wanted the device to reach a large population. Each test costs less than Rs 35 and the result is available in a few seconds,” he said.

The device is priced at Rs 35000 with free hardware and 1000 preloaded test kits. They have got approval from Central Drug Standards Control Organisation (CDSCO), India’s main regulatory body for pharmaceuticals and medical devices, and ISO 13845 certification. “We are working on getting global certification for the device,” he added.

The team, which includes co-founders Chaitali Roy and Sudip Roy, is currently working on the neonatal segment. “This device will give the entire urine report without the use of chemical or pathological intervention,” said Partha before signing off.