While most teens were busy killing hours on Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok during the pandemic, an Atlanta high school student was developing an app with life-saving potential.
Asanshay Gupta, now a rising senior at Atlanta International School, created an app for iPhones and Androids that allows medical professionals to better monitor their supplies of medical oxygen — a critical element in the treatment of COVID-19, as well as pneumonia and malaria.
Asanshay, at age 14, decided to put his knowledge of computer science and app development to work after reading in 2020 about the lack of medical oxygen in many low- and middle-income countries around the globe.
“I felt like I needed to do something to help,” he said.
To date, Asanshay’s app Oxygen Planner has been downloaded by more than 1,300 medical professionals in more than 90 countries, including Africa and India.
Dr. Devashree Chhaparwal, one of the founders of a chain of 10 hospitals in India, said his hospital group used the app in December 2021 while transporting trauma patients on oxygen to the main hospital in Udaipur.
She said it helped the paramedics to calculate how much oxygen each patient would need while in transport.
“This app has a potential to save lives in any mobile unit or peripheral centers where oxygen supply is limited,” Chhaparwal said in an email exchange with Inspire Atlanta.
Asanshay started working on the app in September 2020 and put out one for Android users two months later. It purposely had a simple design for quick and easy use in a crisis, he said.
To design an iOS version, he did a deep dive into the needs of hospitals post-pandemic. He released an iPhone version in July 2021 and had an updated version for Androids ready for release last November.
He estimates that he put about 1,000 hours of work into designing the app over a year and a half.
“I see it as my way of volunteering while stuck at home,” he said, noting that students were learning virtually much of the time.
Asanshay said his goal was to design an app that would help hospital staff understand how much oxygen they are currently using and see how that would change with more patients or higher oxygen demands.
“This makes the app particularly useful in oxygen shortages or other patient crises, so hospitals can see what they need to do to accommodate the lower supply or the larger amount of new patients,” he said.
Asanshay made the app free to hospitals, some of which have been overwhelmed in the worldwide pandemic. Both versions of the app are available on the iOS App Store and the Google Play Store.
U.S. Rep. Nikema Williams, D-Georgia, recently named Asanshay as the 5th District’s winner of the annual Congressional App Challenge, a program encouraging middle school and high school students to learn to code and pursue careers in computer science.
Williams said she was one of the first Georgians to contract COVID-19 and visit the emergency room because she was in need of oxygen.
“So I am personally grateful for Asanshay’s work,” she said. “Atlanta influences everything. And Asanshay is going to continue to influence the world, and I am expecting big things from him.”
Each day, Asanshay uses a Google Analytics dashboard to see the number of people using his app, the countries where they’re using it, and what they are doing with it.
“I love watching it with my grandfather who always lets me know when somebody new pops up,” he said. “It’s really cool to see it being used in so many countries, places I have never been and where I never thought I could have an impact.”
Asanshay was born in Atlanta and started attending the Atlanta International School when he was 4.
“I love that Atlanta is so international and has communities from all over the world.”
He’s always had a passion for languages, math and science but also is interested in photography and design.
He graduates high school next year and hopes to study biomedical engineering or something similar and possibly even go into medicine.
“I’m really interested in using my interests to help my community because I think that’s the most rewarding thing about creating unique and innovative things,” Asanshay said.
Credit: AJC
Credit: AJC
