Greeno’s Rainbow Farm Assist Apps Smoothens Farmers’ Lives

Selva Kumar and Thirukumar Mumoorthy come from farming families and have seen the vagaries of nature take a toll on their parents’ livelihood. They were lucky to have got an engineering degree, considering how many people can’t afford to let their children finish school. Knowing this, Selva and Thiru wanted to help make farmers’ lives much easier, by making vital information about markets, weather, water and other such pertinent news available at their fingertips.

Greeno is the result. The name is a combination of the words ‘green’ and ‘innovation’. They started this venture in 2012, after 10 years of working in the IT industry, with Rs 1 lakh of their own money invested in it. The cool ‘app-as-a service’ that they have developed is a series of apps, under the Rainbow Farm Assist family. Ironically, while the app was meant to assist, as the name suggests, farmers didn’t exactly take to it willingly. Selva told Networked India,

Due to poor adoption of the Rainbow Farm Assist, we were forced to go door to door to promote the user experience to the farmers. We were treated as thieves who are coming in the day time to check the (harvest) target! This initiative ended up there and we were forced to find an alternative (i.e) working with farmer associations.”

“Our first customer was Kalingarayan Farmers Club, where 30,000 acres of land is cultivated by 1,000 farms. Their leadership team listened to our idea keenly but trashed us, as they believed that most of the government’s data is obsolete and not of any use to them. They suggested that we develop a messaging platform that would reach all farmers, and then we started developing the apps.” So, they developed the Rainbow Message, Rainbow Sell, Rainbow Market, and Rainbow Groups.

The Rainbow Message app allows the user to organise their contacts and send text messages in English or any local language. It can also send 30 second voice messages that helps farmers to get information on the weather, the market price, fertiliser vendors, dam water level and also the ability to track crop life-cycle.

The initial version was built with multi-lingual voice input. It offers bulk and unlimited messaging and works even with a basic internet connection. It also lets farmers document and digitize profiles and best practices, as well as connects them with various stakeholders in the agriculture sector.

According to a document shared with Networked India, the Rainbow Sell app connects farmers with street vendors, as well as small stores and shops to reach the end consumer. It can be customised to suit the farmer’s needs and is available in the local language. Other features include:

• Hide/show the details of their choice  
• Vendor can enter details in their local language  
• Shows status of a buy order (Pending/Delivered)  
• Vendor can give a discount for a particular commodity

Rainbow Market app lets users buy agricultural produce and groceries, if they are available nearby. It also helps connect with local vendors, street vendors, shops, mom & pop stores and even farmers, directly. All organic food is also listed for consumers to select and buy.

Other features include:   

• Find a local vendor or even a farmer who wants to sell directly from his/her field   
• Track order status
• Sort commodities by price   

And then the Rainbow Groups app lets a farmer maintain data and documents online. Rainbow Groups can help to manage: 

• Farmer Federation & Farmer Club news
• Individual farmer’s profile   
• Land & crop details   
• Banking information and documents  

Their apps have brought succor to farmers’ existence and the fact that they have benefited from technology, makes the Greeno team tick. Their services are used by: Farmers via the (Farmer Federation, JLG, SHG, Farmer Producer Companies, as well as individual farmers), Veterinary Doctors, Food Buyers, and Resource Institutions supporting farmers.

One such customer using their app has praised Greeno. Jayaraman is a spokesman for Vashista Farmers Producer Company, which is based in Salem. He said, “Team Rainbow Agri did an excellent and professional job. Their team was very responsive, worked with our team very closely and contributed significantly, to help us to create Farmer Producer Companies, Online Free Stores (Mobile App) and with the marketing. The team is very committed and always delivers on time, as promised. We would not hesitate to engage with Rainbow Agri, for any of our future projects related to their areas of expertise.”

What more needs to be said? A very satisfied customer says it best, after all.

Written for Ericsson's blog.

MSSRF Gives Fishermen A Cool & Timely App

As someone who loves her seafood, the fact that the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) is doing some amazing work with fisher folk, (along with other communities which are the backbone of our agricultural community), was more than just pleasant news. It warmed the cockles of my stomach as well as my heart! MSSRF was established in 1988, as a not-for-profit trust, with proceeds from the First World Food Prize that the Founder, Professor MS Swaminathan, received in 1987. He has also authored books like: ‘In Search of Biohappiness: Biodiversity and Food, Health and Livelihood Security’, ‘Agricultural Growth and Human Welfare’, and ‘Groves of Beauty and Plenty’ among others.

The Foundation has programmes going around the country, which range across interests as diverse as coastal system research, biodiversity, bio-technology, eco-technology, and food security. The Foundation states on its website that

MSSRF follows a pro-nature, pro-poor, pro-women and pro-sustainable on-farm and non-farm livelihoods through appropriate eco-technology and knowledge empowerment.”

The Founder and the altruistic spirit behind these initiatives (and research), MS. Swaminathan, told Networked India about some of his programmes. One of them is ‘plant clinics’. He explained, “We have what is called a Plant Clinic Programme for diagnosis of diseases and pests in crops, and we give prescriptions to farmers; (it’s like a clinic for human beings). This is conducted by a set of trained, progressive farmers in the presence of agri-experts. This programme is going on currently in Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, Andhra Pradesh, and Maharashtra.”

There is much more happening though. They even have a mobile app for fishermen called Fisher Friend Mobile App (FFMA)! What got Swaminathan started was empathy for people who work to put food on our table, without the benefit of technology, even as the self-same technology is helping other – more affluent – people’s lives.

Swaminathan explained, “Fishermen are vulnerable with regard to their livelihoods when they are out at sea, due to uncertainty of weather and other critical situations during the monsoon period. Their livelihood depends on the daily fish catch and its value in the market against the amount spent for diesel and boat maintenance. Also, given the competitive situation, as the number of motor boats and trawler owners has increased after the tsunami, due to the support provided by the Government and international organisations.”

“In the absence of information on fish agglomeration in the sea, they have to spend more fuel and time in getting a good catch, which is uncertain. In addition they are at risk if the boat or motor engine is at fault, wherein they are stranded for many days before anyone rescues them.”

It is for these reasons, the “MSSRF has been supporting fisher-folk in the coastal villages of Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, and Andhra Pradesh by providing dynamic information on the Potential Fishing Zone, Ocean State Forecast, Weather, Emergency contacts, Government Schemes, and Disaster alerts, since the beginning of this ICT programme, at the Foundation, in 1998.” 

He added, “There has been a needs assessment and feed meeting with the fisher-folk on a regular basis. In one such meeting in 2006, the fisher-folk expressed a desire to get this information on their mobile phones as short messages than through the public address system. At the same time, Qualcomm attended MSSRF’s annual ICT Convention in Delhi in 2007 and MSSRF shared these demands. Qualcomm came forward to support MSSRF in developing the BREW Application in 2007.”

“FFMA has fulfilled all these risks and gives the Potential Fishing Zone, Ocean State Forecast, weather, and disaster alerts in advance, for them to take informed decisions, to not only make their navigation risk-free and easy but also to get a good catch with minimum time and fuel spent.”

The FFMA is an Android based app that works on any smartphone that has enough memory to install it. It has to have version 4 operating system (OS) or higher, and have GPS capability and 3G/Wi-Fi enabled, to be able to access Google Maps to figure out the Potential Fishing Zone of the day and other information. The app is available in English, Tamil, and Telugu languages and fishermen are given mobile phones along with training on how to use the app. (See a video here.)

Data feeds for parameters like the Potential Fishing Zone, wave height, wind speed and direction, weather information, government schemes available for fishermen’s families has been created on this app. Also, details have been added of the fish species available at each landing centre and their price. The app also provides disaster and International Boundary Line (IBL) alerts. This feature works when a user selects his/her state; then in the background the IBL service kicks in, which continuously monitors the user’s location, as per the current position’s coordinates.

What’s more, emergency contact numbers of all the stakeholders in a fisherman’s life are entered every day, by the MSSRF’s Village Resource Centres (VRCs) from the coastal districts of Tamil Nadu, Pondicherry, and Andhra Pradesh. This data is fed on to a website that was developed specifically for this purpose, which is hosted in the MSSRF server, which in turn, is accessible to the VRCs. The data is provided by the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS), Hyderabad, under the aegis of the Ministry of Earth Sciences.

FFMA User Details
Total number of states covered: Tamil Nadu, Puducherry (Pondicherry), and Andhra Pradesh
Total number of districts covered: 27
Total number of screen views: 3,48,357
Total Users: 3,250

FFMA has helped fishermen immensely over the years. With many of them getting better prices for their catch because of information that the app gives them. They are no longer dependent on middlemen looking to fleece them. This itself has improved their situation financially. It has also cut down on the time, these men stay out at sea. MSSRF has stated that “they used to spend 10-14 days to get a catch of 4 -5 tonnes of fish, which has now increased to 15 tonnes, that is valued at Rs 25 lakhs, while the number of days has reduced to four for the same amount of catch.”

With data like weather and wave height made available to them in advance, they are able to protect themselves and their boats too. One of the fishermen swears by this feature since he almost got swept away despite being an experienced fisherman. He then checked the app and realised he should have stayed on shore that day.

Balakrishnan, a trawler owner, based in Veerampattinam, Puducherry recalled, “After going far out at sea, we experienced high waves. There I checked the FFMA data and came to know about the high wave alert information. The data clearly mentioned that ‘Up to 50 kms from the shore, the waves’ height would be around 7 to 8 feet height and the wind speed also about 37 to 40 kms.’ At the end, it was advised not to venture into the sea.”

“I realised my mistake and for the very first time, questioned my own experience in the profession. Then, without any delay, I sailed back to the shore and saved our lives and the boat without any loss. From then onwards, I started checking the FFMA data cautiously every day before venturing into the sea. The Ocean State Forecast (OSF) information is 100% accurate.”

FFMA is truly a value add app, from the MSSRF stable, as many of its very satisfied users will assert.

Written for Ericsson's blog.

NetPlug Is Aiding ‘Davids To Compete With Goliaths’ In The IoT Space

Why is everyone in the IT space getting breathless about the potential of the Internet of Things (IoT)? Here’s why. By 2020, IoT will be a $19 trillion industry with 50 billion connected devices, according to this statement made by John Chambers, Cisco CEO & Chairman, to Bloomberg.

So, Inventrom is definitely looking to ride this gravy train and this is how they are doing it. They do R&D with other enterprises’ IoT hardware at no cost because NetPlug (their patented hardware architecture) works across devices and systems – be it an electrical appliance or industrial machinery.

This is possible due to their patented technologies like ‘Lib Discovery Protocol’ and ‘Signature Return Algorithm’ developed by Inventrom. Also, social media apps developed for NetPlug can work across systems. This ensures that the minimum time needed, today, to develop IoT products is about 2-3 hours. The next version will reduce this time to a few minutes!

Inventrom’s Founder & Project Lead, Pranav Pai Vernekar told Networked India, “We saw that one of the issues for making IoT enabled products is the huge cost and qualified manpower involved in the R&D. As a result, most of the Internet controlled products in the market today are developed by multinational giants with huge R&D budgets or tech-savvy startups.”

“But what about small-scale manufacturers in Taiwan or Brazil or even Dharavi in Mumbai? Most of these companies have neither the domain knowledge nor the budgets to make their products IoT-ready. Now, this means that as time goes by the smaller players will fail to compete with larger ones. Thus making the rich more rich and keeping the poor poor.”

Inventrom’s team even has an answer to this question: ‘What if my Internet stops working?’ Apparently, NetPlug’s technology automatically shifts to the local network, thus ensuring a seamless experience for the user.

Pranav recalls, “The first product we worked on was an Industrial Load Carrying Robot named MinionBot. We received a lot of interest in the product but the project failed as we were not good at mechanical engineering. However, one part of the robot that worked smoothly was controlling it over the Internet. We decided to focus on the strengths and extend the capability of Internet control to other products. This strategy has worked for us wonderfully. We now believe that one of the most important parts of starting up is focusing on strengths.”

Their business model is ‘pay-as-you-go’ and the current price of a NetPlug unit is $115. They might be looking at charging users $10 per year as uasge fees. However, control over local network will be free. Pranav explained,

With this business model, even a small-scale player like SD Electrical (annual turnover of approximately $35,000) are able to compete with giants like Phillips (approximate turnover of $25 billion) on developing IoT lighting. When we see these Davids compete with the Goliaths and winning, it gives us maximum satisfaction.”

Also, there is the possibility of charging an additional fee for analytics. Their customers can keep tabs on exactly how and when their products are used, and the users’ habits.

This information could be of huge help to them (and their customers) as they are looking to acquire business in the Consumer Electronics, Electrical Appliances, Industrial Machinery, and Defence Machinery industries. They already have clients like Automatic Dosa Makers, IoT Security Systems etc who are developing IoT systems without any capital investment of their own.

Pranav added, “We are also in talks with DRDO to make their bomb disposing robots, IoT enabled. With this, an expert from any part of the world can control the robot. This will directly contribute to saving lives.”

The fact that NetPlug has been well-received, is proven by the fact that they have won many accolades such as the IoT Tech 10 award by Intel and IBM for being one of the best IoT products by a startup. In July, this year, NetPlug was declared as the winner at DST – Lockheed Martin India Innovation Growth Program 2015 for being amongst the best innovations in India. The NetPlug mobile app has also won at the ‘Innovative App/Software Competition’ held as part of the Digital India Week.

What’s more, NetPlug is going places too. The team went (Sept 24) to the US to visit Silicon Valley, as part of the India Innovation Growth Programme (IIGP), where they plan to expand their market for NetPlug.

Written for Ericsson's blog Networked India.

Mycarevault: The One-Stop Patient Engagement Service

In 2009, Sathish Babu Ratakonda was working for the Royal Army of Oman, when he suffered a life-threatening allergic response called anaphylactic shock. He had swelling and hives all over his body, low blood pressure, and dilated blood vessels. He couldn’t talk and his colleagues were not aware of his health conditions. 

As he recovered from it, his thoughts turned to how much worse it could be without a complete medical record of patients being available. That’s where and when, he decided to develop a solution for addressing this need. But he also realised that medical records maintained in silos could make situations worse, so he decided to create movable medical records – i.e. they are available wherever the patients are living or being treated. This is called a ‘Health Information Exchange’. Sathish told Networked India:

Our project mycarevault is a Health Information Exchange for health data, and is the backbone for the entire Indian healthcare system. It has Electronic Health Records (EHR) for healthcare providers and entities and Personal Health Records (PHR) of the patients.”

He explained, “mycarevault EHRs will be available almost for free to doctors and healthcare facilities, who are authorized to work in India and PHRs will also be distributed, again, almost free, for patients in India. PHRs when integrated with EHRs can help doctors to understand a patient’s complication with a holistic approach, and patients can participate in the care.”

“Mycarevault comes with scheduling inter-operability, Unified Health Data Semantics (UHDS) ™, and Nationwide e-Health Architecture (NeHA) ™. UHDS is a medical linguistic tool, which helps interpret the medical language between two IT systems. UHDS has around 1.3 million medical concepts, which are related to daily use in the clinical practice. NeHA architecture is an inter-operable middleware framework, which can help different IT systems communicate with each other and interpret the messages.”

In India, approximately 97% of health-related technologies are adopted, but those adopted systems cannot talk to each other, due to a huge number of factors. One of them being ‘health language’ barriers. Sathish acknowledged that, “the most challenging part for me is finding a solution for creating a unified health language to communicate with other IT systems, so the health data can flow freely between IT systems.” And he seems to have overcome this because he has completed “two years of research and one year of alpha and beta testing in a government setup, at a remote place.”

He says, “I feel very satisfied, when patients walk in with our medical UUID cards, and get care faster than they expected and get testing done in no time. In the beta stage, we have issued 20,000 RFID enabled medical UUID cards to patients and served nearly 1.8 lakh patients.”

Written for Ericsson's blog - Networked India.

Brain Chair: Helps Gain Lost Mobility With Your Brain Waves

Soham Ganatra has sympathy for paralysed people and has done something constructive about it. Seeing them lose their mobility and having to depend on other people for almost everything, which in turn, seriously hampers the quality of their life, made him come up with an innovative wheelchair. He told Networked India, “This problem of disabled people has really motivated us to do the project”

The ‘project’ he is referring to is a ‘Brain Chair’, which is a wheelchair that disabled people can move around at will, by just blinking! He and his team started work on this in June last year, and made the low cost wheelchair. He explained,

By the time we were done with the chair, we started our work on brain waves. This was a bit difficult at first – understanding all the medical terms related to brain waves, but we got used to it. Simultaneously we had also started working on the algorithm to detect brain waves and write code for the same.”

He added, “We faced some glitches in the software, which we got rid of in due course by making constant changes to our code. The next big thing was to actually make the wheelchair move with brain waves. We did the sensor interfacing to our code and connected all the circuitry required to move the wheelchair, and after a week of hard work voila… the wheelchair was actually moving just with the help of brain waves.”

Soham has got great feedback from patients about this wheelchair. Not to mention positive support from doctors too. This has “further motivated me to make this project into a product. The most satisfying moment is the smile and surprise on people’s faces, when they see the wheelchair actually moving, with just their brain waves”, he added.

He and his team of two –  Sunny Modi and Priyank Satra – are all in the final year of their engineering course at the KJ Somaiya College of Engineering in Mumbai. They represented India at Maker Faire in May this year and won three editor choice award tags for their innovative product, which was proudly advertised by their college on their Facebook page.

They sure are making waves of a different kind as well!

Written for Ericsson's blog.

A Smart Helmet That Protects Bikers From Themselves

Are you sick of how two-wheeler riders flout traffic lights and endanger themselves and others around them? Not to mention the road rage we have to endure, when pedestrians point it out to them? Don’t you wish they end up on their face some day, for doing it? Well, some IIT guys have figured that this may happen at some point, if it hasn’t already, so they are looking to raise funding for a ‘smart’ helmet, which will protect reckless riders from themselves.

Rishabh Babeley, Naman Singhal, and Shubham Jaiswal are the brains behind ‘Helmatron’, which is a helmet that a rider has to wear to start his bike. Else, without it, the bike won’t start. Its other features include being able to restrict drunk riding, since it has an alcohol sensor installed in it, which monitors the alcohol content on their breath. This feature alone should make people riding two-wheelers safe for the rest of us too! Their profile on applyifi also stated that

It has a GPS-GSM feature which will call an ambulance immediately and send an SMS alert to selected contacts, in case the rider meets with an accident.”

It also has bluetooth encryption technology which will curb vehicle thefts substantially. The team is working “on a peltier cooling assembly” which is going to be fitted in the helmet to make it cooler and comfortable too. Then they are thinking of installing a touch navigation system, to assist the rider in reaching his destination in the most efficient way.

Helmatron is a product that can improve the mortality rate in India, which has overtaken China, and now has the worst road traffic accident rate worldwide. The World Health Organization (WHO,) in its first ever Global Status Report on Road Safety stated that there is one death every four minutes due to a road accident in India. Also 16 children die on Indian roads daily and 70% of road accidents in India, occur due to drunk driving. Also, six motorcycles are stolen every hour here.

Being well aware of the above statistics, the Helmatron team is looking to develop a fully functional prototype and develop the necessary infrastructure with funding, they are expecting to raise, to the tune of $25,000 and a following round of $3 million. Their revenue model includes getting a patent and earning from copyrights. They plan to use any financing they get, on developing the first 50 helmets, to kick-start the business.

They just might have a winning idea here, as their research has shown that this is a $1-2 billion market globally, and there is potential for 15% growth. If all goes well, they plan to achieve revenues of $10-$25 million, with 80 lakh customers wearing their helmets, in three years.

Picture is representative.

Written for Ericsson's blog.

Connected Car: From Your Wheels To Your Phone

Sagar Apte is a car enthusiast. We all know what this means..don’t we? They all start out collecting those Hot Wheels car models as kids and then start tinkering with their parents’ cars as they grow older, much to their horror. The local garage mechanic is probably a Facebook pal these days!

But Sagar went one up on his pet passion and created CarIQ – a connected car ecosystem. He told Networked India, “I used to spend a lot of time with the mechanics when I took my car for servicing. That’s when I came across this port, known as OBD, inside every car. I learnt that this port had details on mileage, kilometers driven, driving style, and any problems with the car. To me, a natural question was what the hell is that doing in the car? It should be on my phone – for me to know and take corrective action. Also, save money and have the confidence of driving a good car. That’s when we got started working on the unit, to get this data on to the Internet. That is what CarIQ is today.”

CarIQ connects a car owner, through mobile apps to “service providers like garages, insurance companies, marketers and roadside assistance providers”, states its website. What’s more, a car owner can “interact with service providers on the basis of data collected from your car by CarIQ”, states its website.

Initially, things were not smooth sailing and they didn’t get much help with technical stuff. Sagar recalls, “We were working on solving this one problem for three months with no resolution in sight, and it was a time when all of us were wondering if we had started on a fool’s errand. But that’s when we met a couple of other entrepreneurs. We spent some good quality time speaking with them, and realised these are pretty normal stories of any young startup.” He added,

These entrepreneurs not only gave us the much needed confidence to go on but also provided help and assistance. I think the entrepreneurial community in Pune is simply amazing in its ability to come forward and provide assistance.”

The CarIQ app is available for Android and Windows phones with features that let you:

• Replay trips taken
• View your car’s logs
• Monitor its location
• Configure and get over-speeding/geo-fence alerts, servicing reminders and vehicle health alerts

So, all people have to do is buy the CarIQ SmartPlug that connects their car to the CarIQ platform. SmartPlugs are available in two variants – GSM and Bluetooth, for Rs 6,500 and Rs 4,000 respectively. To buy it and to take a look at their features, go here.

Sagar is happy with the response he has got for his product, especially when customers tell him, their own stories. He says, “A certain customer was in an unfortunate accident and he literally used CarIQ records to show he wasn’t over- speeding. Imagine him telling this to a group of people, when we were around!”

Written for the Ericsson blog.

Am I A Producer or A Performer?

A question I've asked myself quite a bit over the years and now found an answer to. Ofcourse, a lot of people think they are both, but they are sadly mistaken. Below is my result of the 'Are You A Producer or A Performer' Test:

You Have PRODUCER POTENTIAL

You show a tendency to use the internal skills — what we call habits of mind — that producers apply to everything they do. They include:

• Empathetic imagination: seeing blockbuster potential in the needs and wants of others
• Patient urgency: operating simultaneously at multiple speeds and time frames
• Inventive execution: bringing together creative thinking and operational prowess
• Taking a relative view of risk: accepting immediate losses if they lead to a better future
• Leadership partnership: looking for others with complementary skills that enhance their own

However, you are also comfortable in the role of a performer, working in an environment where the parameters and rules of engagement are established.

Corporate environments need both producers, who have the ability to imagine entirely new products and business models, and performers, who can navigate known systems to optimize opportunities. Performer opportunities abound in business (and greatly outnumber openings for producers), so many people with producer potential get drawn into a performer mind-set. It is distracting to try to fulfill both roles; it is better to pick one approach, and look for a partner who can complement you.

If you want to see how far you can go as an innovator, try to get involved with a new opportunity at your company and approach it as a producer would. Question standard approaches to a problem. Imagine what different designs to the pricing or business model of a product might yield. Look for a performer who can help it get the recognition and support it needs to come to life.

You can do the test here.

‘Smart Wand’ Wearable Monitors Patients Closely

If you were ever a patient or a family member has been one, then you really do keep your fingers crossed that everything turns out alright, don’t you? You are literally in someone else’s hands and that’s not necessarily God! 

The hospital staff has you and hundreds of others, whom they are monitoring at the same time, and a slip in concentration or just lack of timely attention can be fatal.

A bunch of IIT-Mumbai geeks – Suryakant Thoraskar, Vineesh VS, and Anjaly TR – came up with an idea, to make life easy for healthcare professionals. Vineesh VS told Networked India what inspired him and the others was that, “According to statistics, the number of qualified nurses-to-patient ratio in India, is far less than the required number. There have been many unfortunate incidents where the condition of a patient has gotten worse, or they even die due to the lack of timely attention from the nurses. With the limited number of nurses, hospitals are struggling to give proper care to the patients.”

Knowing this, a wearable like Smart Ward was just waiting to happen. It is an automated patient monitoring system, based on the Android platform, that provides real-time values of the patients’ vitals, and alerts the staff about critical changes in those parameters. He added that the big challenge for them was:

Keeping the price of the wearable as low as possible while maintaining the quality of the signal. Hence, we needed to keep only the necessary vitals which are really required for regular monitoring of the patient.”

Worldwide, there are others as well, who have realised the importance and the need for such devices and apps. Like the students at the University of Wollongong in Dubai, who have designed the MyChol app, which monitors a patient’s health and fitness level and “includes diet logs and step trackers but adds unique features such as cholesterol level logs as well as calculations based on factors specific to the patient.”

Picture is representational and was written for Ericsson's blog.

DEIAB: A ‘Jugaad’ Route To Teach Rural Kids

Ever wondered if children living in remote areas of India have even seen a tablet? Or held one and learnt their lessons, when there is no steady electricity supply to their villages, or even teachers available? Well, someone has made this happen now. Founder & Director, Edtech, Buddha Burman has set up Digital-Education-in-a-Box (DEIAB). He was inspired by a conversation he had with a friend, Rohini, who had spent a few years in West Bengal and the North-East and had described some of the schools she had come across in the rural and tribal areas.

Burman told Networked India, “She went on to mention a study called the ‘Digital Youth Project’ conducted by the MacArthur Foundation a few years ago. The study explored how digital media is changing the way young people learn, play, socialize and participate in civic life. As per the study, the term digital divide, when used a decade ago, described the gap between those who had access to computers and the Internet and those who did not.”

“While doing some field test in a remote, rural school, a kid approached us and asked: ‘Will this system help me in becoming a Scientist?’ We were moved to see the dream of a rural kid and this motivated us to find a way to educate millions of rural kids, so they can live their dreams. Also most of the big educational companies, only focus on the urban population segment.”

He added, “Today, it is less about access to technology and more about participation. Participation includes the quality of engagement and what people are doing with the technology that they have access to. This, along with my experience at the rural schools that I had visited, motivated us to start thinking about something that could bridge the digital divide. Thus, arose the idea that led to the building of this operational prototype.”

DEAIB is an advanced portable education platform that extends the ability to create a digital classroom in the middle of nowhere – without the need for buildings or electricity. So, imagine a Wi-Fi-enabled classroom in a pristine location, where digital content, tablets, and quality teachers, engage students and make a positive impact on their learning and performance.

The complete ecosystem features affordable hardware, software and long range Wi-Fi, tablets for autonomous learning, teachers for supported learning, and innovative educational content. An intermittent connection to the cloud enables the syncing of data between the remote hub and the central cloud server, thus helping DEIAB track learning progress and the effectiveness of the system. This platform will act as a service model and will drive accessibility in remote areas.

For the DEIAB team, who were also finalists at the mBillionth Awards South Asia 2015, the biggest challenge was to build a system which is hi-tech, yet simple enough to be used by people in rural areas. So they designed the system to be portable and which works with very low power, using solar energy, and connected to a long range antenna which creates a Wi-Fi zone of around 1 km, so students can use tablets easily.

Having made such a laudable attempt to create a level playing-field for children lacking resources, for Burman, the icing on the cake is when people come to see how the system works and then are amazed about it. And he loves it, when he hears this from many parents: “Babuji agar yeh baksa humarey bachhon ko miljaye, toh woh bhi afsar ban jayenge.” (If our children get this ‘box’, even they will become officers.”)

Read more similar stories:
http://www.networkedindia.com/2015/08/24/lab-on-a-tab-is-inspired-by-kids-potential-to-be-curious-thiagarajan/

http://www.networkedindia.com/2015/07/18/shikkhok-teaches-500000-students-for-less-than-rs-1000-a-year/

The Cool Digital Study Tool For Millennium Kids

Parents are worried about how to bring up their children well in this pervasive digital world, where too much information (of the right and wrong kind) is available at their fingertips literally, through smartphones and other devices. But it’s really education, where all parents want digital enhancements to benefit their kids. While, this is slowly starting to happen, it is still not a common enough feature of most curricula.

This is something Neeraj Jewalkar, CEO of Smartur 3D found out, when he started scouting for schools for his four year old son. He realised that most schools were sticking to the tried-and-tested methods of teaching. As he told Networked India, “Use of technology in classrooms was very rare. Thus the journey of Smartur began, with a strong conviction that technology would make a transformative impact in the learning outcome of students in school.”

Smartur 3D is an e-learning Android app that is targeted towards students, ranging from kindergarten to the 12th grade. It offers 3D visualisation of key science and math concepts, using cutting edge technology, to bring those concepts to life. Having over 300 models, across grades, helps with making studying stress-free and fun. The app is targeted towards both students as well as teachers for maximum adoption. While the teachers can access it for free at present, the student pays a minimal amount for it.

Some of these models include: Human anatomy, skeleton system, digestive system, respiratory system, excretory system, animal cell, plant cell, Brain, arrangement and types of teeth, parts of the ear. sectional view of eye, bacterium, hydra, germination, parts of a flower, amoeba, animals, fruits, flowers etc. To give it more of an international flavour as well, models include 10 types of christmas trees used across USA, and important monuments like the Lincoln Memorial, Statue of Liberty, Liberty Bell etc.

This digital learning product has won the ‘Best Smart Class Product’ last year at the World Education Summit, and has been nominated for the mBillionth Award South Asia this year, in the M-Education and Learning category. The app is free to download, with some course material available for free. However, the entire app content is further available for a cost of Rs 575, for both CBSE Class 10 syllabus and Digilab, for a period of one year on a subscription basis.

The software is available for Rs 30,000 and can be used by an unlimited number of students and teachers, and as Smartur 3D’s site states, it is already being used in over 12,000 schools, by students from over 25 states. Over 6,000 teachers are engaged in their e-learning programme.

The main features of the app are:

• Interactive 3D
• Stereoscopic 3D
• Augmented Reality

Of these, Augmented Reality is the most popular feature as it helps bring 3D learning content from the virtual world into the real world. Smartur 3D is used by teachers in classrooms to help explain difficult concepts to students, in an eye-catching and interactive format.

Neeraj recalls, “When we built our first version of Smartur 3D and started approaching schools, there was a lot of appreciation for the product. However we soon realized that most schools just did not have the basic hardware to run the product. This was particularly painful. Most schools lacked even a single working computer.”

“We had to go back to the drawing board and relook at the entire approach. We figured out that the only way to have Smartur 3D reach the 200 million students across the country, was to go mobile. We had to rebuild the entire product from scratch for the mobile platform all over again!”

The rebuilt product is so cool (see their videos) that it will make adults want to go back to school. And why not, with features like these in the app: Take apart individual parts, hide parts, highlight parts, set transparency, break-up the whole model, analyse parts, take a screenshot of the model, it allows for customisation, and it even has a pen tool for drawing and writing your own points on the model.

All in all, Neeraj feels the decision to go mobile was the best. He added, “Once Smartur 3D was available on mobile, we saw tremendous adoption. The most satisfying aspect was the extremely high enthusiasm of teachers from government schools in using Smartur 3D in their classrooms. We felt that the product was finally reaching the most needy lot of users.”

Smartur 3D is truly a collaborative way to study. Its content creation features lets you capture images of the model in HD (high definition) or lets teachers shoot a video, while explaining a model. They can even add a video in, while lecturing. Classroom teaching doesn’t get more interesting than this. And studying has just got so much more sass!

Read more stories in the Education series:
http://www.networkedindia.com/2015/09/11/mindspark-shoos-away-math-phobia-with-its-enriched-content/

http://www.networkedindia.com/2015/07/20/loksewa-nepal-app-is-efficient-cheapest-mode-of-studying-for-nepal-govt-exams/