A device that works in a city hospital can fail completely in a rural primary health centre. Designing for the real operating conditions is the entire challenge.
The real operating environment
India has over 150,000 sub-health centres and 25,000+ primary health centres. The vast majority have no diagnostic capability beyond weight, height, blood pressure, and temperature. Any device meant to serve them has to survive intermittent power, non-air-conditioned environments, dust, humidity, and operation by staff who are not laboratory specialists.
The design brief that follows
These conditions are not edge cases to be handled later — they are the starting specification. Minimal reagent dependency removes the cold chain. Rugged hardware survives the environment. A guided, simple workflow makes a non-specialist operator reliable. AI-assisted interpretation reduces the expertise required to read a result.
The objective is multi-parameter diagnostic capability at the level of the primary health centre, where roughly 80% of India’s initial care contact happens — not another central lab that the patient still cannot reach.
Dr. POCT, HELIX ONE, and JIVAXA are prototype- and engineering-development-stage programs. No device has been clinically validated or regulatory approved.