TECH SPECIAL...................... Sugar from tears and blinks from brain waves

Sugar from tears and blinks from brain waves

You thought a contact lens is only for helping you see well. Now it has been put to more uses, thanks to Drs. Brian Otis and Babk Parviz. He has put in two rings on a contact lens, containing chemical sensors which measure the level of sugar in your tears, using a spectral readout. This is the new Google Contact Lens. Move over to India. The other day, Mr Sanjay Gadadhalay, a design engineer demonstrated to us a 2" x 4" device that tapes on to the backside of a smartphone. You grasp the device at its two ends and 30 seconds later it displays your electrocardiogram. This ECG graph can be downloaded, stored, printed out and emailed for a cardiologist to examine.

Fabricated by Indian innovators, and brought out by Khosla Enterprise, this hand-held phone/ECG is bound to outpace and replace the elaborate process currently used in hospitals. Or the cute, yet educative and playful puzzle for blind children, called “Fittle”, devised by Tania Jain from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, which helps blind children learn both the Braille script and the shape of objects. One example is the shape of a fish that the child has to fit in as a jigsaw puzzle. Once the pieces are fitted right, the child gets an idea of the shape of a fish, and when she runs over the surface, she can read out the Braille alphabets for the word fish. The child learns both shapes and the letters in Braille, using a toy. (Access Fittle and enjoy it at www.indiegogo.com/fittle).

Kiran Trivedi, who teaches engineering at Bhavnagar, has come out with a headband you can strap on your temples, which detects and records the brain signals (EEGs), which are captured using a B3 band sensor blue-toothed to an Android phone. This is used to count the number and strengths of blinks your eye does every minute through these signals. This device, which he calls BlinkDroid, allows him to detect abnormal eye conditions such as blepharospasm or fetal alcohol spectrum disorders. Amera Ali, Aparna Hariharan, Ayushman Talwar, Laksh Kumar, Rahul Avaghan, Shakti Priyan, Syed Junaid Ahmed, Sai Revanth — all students from local engineering colleges at Hyderabad — have devised a Braille Translator and Printer.

It reads a text in English, translates and prints it out in Braille. For the last a few years, another youngster, Sumit Dagar, has been trying to make a Braille cellphone and a ‘pad.’ Imagine combining these two innovations — what a boon for the blind!

These are but four of over 30 such innovations that came out of two fortnight-long workshops that the innovation centre called Srujana at the L V Prasad Eye Institute, Hyderabad has conducted, along with BITS Pilani- Hyderabad (last year) and the IT company CYIENT (formerly called InfoTech, this year), and the Media Labs of MIT, Cambridge, MA, U.S.

Each time about 100 students in the 3rd or 4th year of their professional courses from across the country are selected to come and spend their first week at the eye hospital, think of any device they think would be of use or improvement, and work on the idea during the next week. They form about 15-20 groups, given the facilities and are mentored by the LVP-MIT team. The whole atmosphere is informal, highly interactive, yet very hardworking (often 24/7, to meet the time deadline), and mutually enhancing both for the student innovators and their mentors.

Noteworthy points

Several things are noteworthy about such workshops. (1) The students are predominantly from local areas, and not always from top ranking institutions. (2) They are immersed in a real-life situation for a week in the hospital; this not only gave them a reality check but also prodded them to think about the less advantaged and what can be done about the objects used to treat these subjects. (3) Each student goes out with self-confidence, an ability to express his/her thoughts cogently and logically, and to promise to spend time to better the device in the coming months. (4) There are just as many girls as boys in the workshop. (5) Almost all of them use the smartphone as the medium, realising its potential as a microcomputer which can be used way beyond oral communication, and devise ‘Apps.’

Herein is an example of what Marshal McLuhan said in a different context: “medium is the message.” And it brought forth a sense of scholarship, achievement and entrepreneurship in them. (6) Above all, it shows once again that innovation is not incremental but expansive and even disruptive; that it has the power to extend the boundaries of existing methods and materials. It is an act of creation, all it needs is a thinking mind, and it can be done by anybody.

D. BALASUBRAMANIAN TH140724