Run by Ernakulam District Administration
The Superhero Network was piloted in Ernakulam district, Kerala. It is currently operational and has been approved for implementation across all 14 districts of Kerala.
Ernakulam is the first district in Kerala to have a digital strategy to deploy essential assets. The COVID-19 lockdown situation needed some urgent response action from the administration level. The strategy needs the following critical aspects.
Critical aspects
How to isolate and move patients/citizens with symptoms
How to provide essential commodities like food and medicine to citizens
To handle the critical aspects district administration created the following.
a) Ambulance network -
Asset used: Ambulance drivers
Organised and controlled by the RTO enforcement through the district collector's office, the Ambulance network is used to move patients to Corona Care Centres(CCC) in the district and to hospitals based on symptoms and criticality.
b) Medicine delivery -
Asset used: Medicine delivery volunteers
It is organised and controlled by IMA Kochi for free medicine. Essential medicine dispersal through primary health centres and other medicine requests are handled by a group of volunteer doctors controlled by IMA.
c) Food delivery -
Asset used: Food delivery volunteers
It is organised and controlled via community kitchens and serves essential food requests through them. Community kitchens are established in the panchayat level.
In the initial phase, all these requests are received through calls and handled via call centres. The district administration requires a logistics system for the management based on request. Each authority can place their request which is received by the asset network. This request is fulfilled by assets using their Superhero app.
This logistics system should manage assets with minimum human involvement and mobility. This logistics system should be efficient and capable enough to:
a) Provide essential service at the shortest period of time.
To provide essential service at the shortest time, the system should be able to allocate a volunteer/resource closest to the pickup location of the service.
(Most of the services have a pickup location and delivery location.)
Essential data points
Name of the citizen making the request
Type of request
Pickup location
Delivery location/delivery address
Contact number
b) Efficient method of volunteer/resource allocation.
The system needs a provision of notifying those resources closest to the pickup location until a volunteer accepts the request.
c) Seamless navigation of assets.
The moving assets of current system includes ambulance drivers and volunteers to deliver food and medicine. For seamless navigation, it requires the following facilities. The Superhero app provides following facilities:
i) delivery address/location
ii) Facility to call
iii) Facility to navigate through Google Maps.
Once the delivery is completed, it is marked so.
Visualisation console
The Visualisation Console creates an overview of all volunteer assets available to the district administration of Ernakulam. A Super-user of the Visualisation Console can summon ambulances to move a critical patient to the nearest hospital with available ICU beds. It can also mobilise voluntary delivery crews to move medicines, food or any essential commodity from one location to another. Every volunteer asset will be tracked and plotted on maps.
This console provides an overview of each asset deployed in a district for district administrators.
Current statistics
( data as per April 12, 2020)
Ambulance drivers: 80
Medicine delivery volunteers: 90
Estimated numbers
When the currently deployed system works in full scale, the estimated number of requests goes high. We would then require more assets and efficient allocation through the Superhero app.
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