It is said that more than one third of the world’s malnourished children live in India. Ayush Gharat, 15 years old from Head Start Educational Academy, has designed mNutrition, a mobile application that diagnoses malnutrition. After his visit to a few places where there are numerous homeless children on the streets within the city, he was determined in doing his part to eradicate malnutrition.
Ayush, a partial guitarist is very fond of technology. Ayush says, “The irony is the rural population are not aware of the malnutrition and the urban population are not aware of the extent of its effects. I’m designing the app in such a handy way, that even the Anganwadi teachers and the rural population will also be able to use it.”
With proper research material from the WHO and other research papers, Ayush designed the app that diagnoses this severe issue in the country. By answering few basic questions about the child that include details like the weight, height, gender, mNutrituin app identifies whether the child is malnourished or not. The cumulative results are based on the WHO charts with guided measures for calculations.
An image of a malnourished child
He is also one of the top 100 finalists of the Google Science Fair where he proposed the idea of mNutrition in October. With his intention to serve his nation and to help eradicate malnutrition, he feels that mNutrition can create the impact in the country.
He is also Android and JAVA certified (with Platinum and Gold certificates respectively) which he used to take up during the weekends. When asked about his time-management, he said, “It’s been two years since I’m into my field of interest. Being active in my extracurricular activities in the school, I also manage my homework and take online course too.”
IAPEN (Indian Association for Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition) is working in collaboration with Ayush and helping him with the necessary information and implementation of the application. Very soon, mNutrition will be available for usage by everyone. Ayush is willing to offer it to the government or the health departments of Bengaluru to make the platform live. Ayush adds, “This handy mobile application will surely make an impact not just within the country because malnutrition is a global issue. To make the app more easy and smart, I will add more parameters like artificial intelligence which gives the precise outcome. Further, I will also add the measures to avoid, side effects, supplements and medicines to deal with malnutrition.”
He created his personal Twitter account to see if anyone would be willing to collaborate with him on mNutrition. He adds, “I got an overwhelming response from the Health ministry and nutrition department and they asked if I could give them a detailed presentation.”
