When students of his age are busy playing PUBG and becoming pros, Ayush Gharat who is in Std 9 in the Head Start Educational Academy in Bangalore has become a certified Associate Android Developer. He is aware of the country’s vast poor population. He knew exactly what he needs to be done to develop a solution to help the less unfortunate ones.
Gharat designed a software solution to help the country’s financially lacking children are fed properly. His creation, mNutrition, offers organisations a path to make sure that children on the streets receive plenty of food and even more so that any signs of malnutrition can be detected quickly and sorted out.
In fact, Malnutrition is the primary cause of child mortality in the country. As per World Bank, 44% of children in India under the age of 5 are extremely malnourished. Due to this very reason, they are also prone to disease and things get worse when their ability to learn is prevented.
Nutrition appears to be an easy-access platform for health workers to detect malnutrition in the early stage itself so they can pinpoint which children needs utmost care and protection.
To make it easy to obtain and use, Gharat designed mNutrition, an easily downloaded smartphone app so that health workers can easily use it to input necessary medical details like age, sex, height, weight, etc.
The app then uses the WHO’s 2006 calculation tables to detect whether a child is extremely underweight, and therefore malnourished.
The application is built in such a way that even local community workers and volunteers can use it with such ease, even if they’re not literate. The app stores each child’s medical information and other details and can be used to monitor treatment with antibiotics and food supplements, including the kid’s responses to the drugs.
This makes mNutrition an efficient tool for implementation in rural or remote areas, where professionals may not be available to meet up with the children and where resources and access to healthcare might be limited or costly.
The mobile application is a major breakthrough from current monitoring methods, which count on tracking observations on paper and with archaic filing systems. But, mNutrition instead effectively makes use of cloud storage system, and is in fact, compatible with most devices like Android, iOS, and web apps.
“In the long run, the success of the programs led by the government highly depends on successful implementation by the health workers,” Gharat writes in his report. “A technological innovation such as mNutrition being used as a mobile calculator, helps the children being screened correctly and reliably in a short period of time.”
Gharat, at present, is one of the top 100 regional finalists of the Google Science Fair 2018-2019. Digging a bit deep, it is a competition where students work towards environmental, social, and economic betterment with the implementation of advanced science and technology.