Hyderabad: TEDxBitsHyderabad saw several great speakers and keeping in mind the student community, the organisers saved the best for the last. “Share an Idea with TED” saw three young speakers, who were chosen from around the country, presenting their products that could shape our future.
Now, Stories on a pillow
Twenty-year-old Kaustubh Shivdikar and his team have a magical product that can very easily put an end to the books one reads out loud to children as bed-time stories. The app, Magic Pillow, can materialise bedtime stories; all one needs is a mobile phone and, yes, the pillow. “There was a competition held at Bombay Stock Exchange in May 2014 called Angel Hack, where my team won the second prize for building an augmented storytelling app. We were invited to San Francisco to display our project.
That’s where it all started,” says Kaustubh, a student at Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute. One just needs to point their phone towards the pillow. And then, they get the option of an augmented story interface right there, on the pillow. “The app will be available for free and the ‘magic’ pillow will be available at a normal pillow’s cost.”
Light in the darkness
The idea to develop a smartphone-based indoor mobility system called Roshini was first chanced upon by Dhruv Jain, a student of IIT-Delhi who has hearing impairment and was developed by Dhruv and Prabhav Aggarwal. “I was asked to be a part of his team when I joined IIT-Delhi in 2012,” says Shiveesh Fotedar, product designer in Team Roshini and also the speaker who presented the product at TedxBitsHyderabad.
“Roshini is a GPS-enabled system which can guide hearing impaired people through an infrared-based navigation system.” What is different from the existing indoor mobility system is that Roshini is going to be affordable and equally effective. “We plan to collaborate with corporations now,” he says.
Spoonful of help
Left alone at home to look after her two brothers who have cerebral palsy, Rashida Taksin found it difficult to feed them and had to call for help. “This incident triggered the spark to do something,” says 19-year-old Rashida, a student of Manipal Institute of Technology.
In May, Rashida was shortlisted for the Global Startup Labs, an initiative by MIT(US), which takes place at Bengaluru every year. “I met my team there and together, we came up with ‘Spoonful’, a product in its nascent stage which enables people to eat on their own. The prototype, made in three weeks, costs '1,000. In India, there are no such devices, the US has three, but all them are priced at around $3,000 ('1,82,686.50). Our final product should come up to Rs 3,000,” says Rashida.
