The frantic search for blood is a story many of us in the KSUM Kochi campus know too well. It’s a story of desperate phone calls, scattered social media pleas, and the anxious wait for a response. In a city brimming with technological innovation, we decided to build a better way ourselves: the Blood Connect bot.
This past World Blood Donor Day, that question was answered. This is the story of how a difficult community problem sparked a passion project, and how a single day of focused effort created a new network of hope.
When a Professional Mission Becomes Personal
At Bagmo, our day-to-day work involves building IoT solutions to manage blood bank inventories. We live and breathe the logistics of blood availability. And soon, this professional mission became a personal one.
We started receiving calls right here on the KSUM campus – anxious voices from our own community looking for blood donors for a loved one. We faced a painful dilemma: we had no donor directory, and we could never, and would never, share anyone’s data without their explicit consent. But the thought of simply saying “we can’t help” felt wrong. We knew we had to do something.
A Day of Purpose: Building for a Cause
With World Blood Donor Day approaching, we decided our contribution this year would be more than just awareness; it would be action. Our entire team made a collective decision: we dedicated a full day, putting aside all regular work, to tackle this problem head-on.
This initiative was born as a pure social contribution from that one focused day—a “hackathon for humanity” where every member of the Bagmo team channeled their skills into a single mission: creating the Bagmo Blood Connect bot.
How it Works: A Simple, Smart, and Secure Solution
The idea was to build a tool that was accessible to everyone, not another app to download. The result is a smart WhatsApp service that acts as a secure bridge between donors and patients.
- For Donors: Volunteers can register in under two minutes. They only receive private notifications for their specific blood type, and their contact information is only shared after they explicitly consent to a particular request. Privacy and control are paramount.
- For Requesters: A person in need can send out a request through the bot. The system then works silently in the background, notifying all available and matching donors instantly and privately.
It replaces the chaos of public searches with a quiet, dignified, and highly efficient system.
Stronger Together: The Power of Partnership
An idea born from passion needs a supportive ecosystem to thrive. This project would not have been possible without our incredible partners, who believed in the vision from day one. We are immensely grateful to Kerala Startup Mission (KSUM) for their unwavering support and for fostering the ecosystem this was born from, and to Maker Village for inspiring us with their culture of innovation and building real-world solutions.
An Awesome Beginning
We launched the bot on World Blood Donor Day, and the response from our community was nothing short of awesome. Before the day was over, more than 300 voluntary donors had registered just from the campus community alone.
To those 300+ founding donors, our amazing teammates, and our incredible partners – thank you. You took a difficult problem and helped us turn it into a living network of hope. This is just the beginning, and we are excited to build this blueprint for hope, together.
