patiala iit ropar which was envisaged as a technology business incubation unit tbiu is carving out a niche for itself as the centre for developing new technology especially for space and defence programmesthe institute is also focused on regionspecific research and development in water resources management and cancer research it is also working on a project to establish a biox consortium to address big challenges in healthcare and medicineiit ropar director sk das the consortium can be used in smaller cities to rule out cases of cancer as punjab has a high prevalence of cancer especially in cities and towns where highend diagnostic equipment are not available this biox consortium can be used to manage patients and the disease the project is being undertaken in collaboration with iit mandi and pgimer chandigarh once approved for commercial use it would provide low cost cancer detection facilities across state which is grappling with high number of cancer cases he addedin the field of surgical aids iit ropar is developing a bonemeasuring alignment device for knee surgery as knee replacement or knee arthroplasty is a surgical procedure to replace the weightbearing surfaces of the knee joint to relieve pain and disability the surgeon needs to know the natural angle between the transepicondylar axis tea and posterior condylar axis pca which is different for different patients the angle should be measured accurately to ensure that there is no postsurgery complication like persistent pain stiffness and laxitythe computer vision and machine learning for human behaviour analysis is another project that the iit is working on intoxicated state detection can provide an automatic method to estimate if a person is drunk the method has achieved more than 80 accuracy in detecting a drunk person as it capitalizes on the visual cuesthe institute is also developing a walking aid for aged people that can be used for variable height and angle adjustments for different kinds of tasks that require partial sitting the other projects that the iit faculty is working on include an alarm for the deaf with features like water sprinkler for the face a mobile system fitted with any bicycle that can be used along with cardiovascular monitoring equipmentdas said the institute was engaged in the field of education and research and provides sciencebased engineering education to produce quality engineerscientists the institute apart from establishing a robust teaching environment is keen to facilitate and support cuttingedge research in a variety of areasit has also set up a robotic centre called punjrobotics to coordinate local activities in robotics and also to link up with regional national and international activities two punjrobotics studios are coming up where highenergy robots such as industrial defence and agricultural robot applications and lowenergy robots such as service robots where close humanrobot interaction is essential will be worked on