Six students from BITS PILANI have created India’s Official First Aid Mobile Application as their summer internship project from 23rd May -16th July at Indian Red Cross Society, NHQ, New Delhi. On 30th August, the Annual General Meeting of Indian Red Cross was held. It comprised of a ceremonial session and a business session. The Ceremonial Session was presided over by the President of IRCS and the President of India Hon’ble Shri Pranab Mukherjee at Rashtrapati Bhavan, New Delhi and Business Session was presided over by Hon’ble Chairman of IRCS and the Minister of Health & Family Welfare Shri J.P Nadda at DRDO Bhavan, New Delhi.

Tushar Dhalwani, the leader of the team that developed the app participated in both the sessions. The app was launched during the Business Session by Shri J.P Nadda.

The user friendly App empowers one to take care of some of the basic medical emergencies. It has one tap call feature to the national emergency helpline. Moreover, it has facility to track user location using GPS of the mobile and display route to nearby hospitals in radius of 5 Km. This has been implemented using Google Maps. Gradually, Indian Red Cross shall keep updating it and make it more useful for the community.

Many other Red Cross Societies including the American Red Cross and British Red Cross have their own First Aid App that helps their users in emergency situations. Most importantly, these apps are restricted to their own countries and are inaccessible to Indian users. Hence it becomes a necessity for Indian Red Cross to have its own First Aid app. A First Aid manual had been published by Indian Red Cross in collaboration with Belgian Red Cross. The app is a digitized version of the same. The app is free and is currently available on Google Playstore for download.

The team of developers of the app comprises of Tushar Dhalwani (Pilani Campus), Rishabh Garg (Pilani Campus), Bhuvan Gupta (Goa Campus), Akanksha Pandey(Hyderabad Campus),Shrey Bansal (Hyderabad Campus), Rahul Mittal(Hyderabad Campus).