Three Indians make it to MIT's prestigious under-35 innovators list

Rahul Panicker and Saurabh Srivastava were named under the humanitarian category while Rohan Paul made it to the inventor category, reports Tech in Asia

Three young Indians have made it to MIT’s prestigious list of under-35 innovators. Rahul Panicker (34), Rohan Paul (30), and Saurabh Srivastava (30) have been named among the 35 whose works “illustrate the most important emerging technologies of the moment.”

Rahul Panicker

A Stanford graduate, he came up with a way to keep premature babies warm, and it has been used in 15 countries to help nearly 200,000 babies.

“Humanity has known for over 100 years that keeping premature babies warm dramatically increases their survival rates. Yet most vulnerable babies around the world don’t benefit from this knowledge,” Rahul explains in the MIT Technology Review.

“So we came up with a prototype incubator that costs one percent as much as traditional solutions and can be operated by a non-expert.”

He quit his job in 2009 and moved to Bengaluru where, along with co-founders Jane Chen, Linus Liang, Naganand Murthy, and Razmig Hovaghimian, he started Embrace. 
 

Rohan Paul

Rohan studied at IIT Delhi. That’s where he was inspired to create a smart cane for the blind that costs $50 and has been used by 10,000 people.

 

Rohan, along with others, came up with a sleek handle-shaped attachment that fits onto the traditional white cane used by the blind. When tested in 2012, it reduced collisions by 95%. The product was released in early 2014.
 

Saurabh Srivastava

A researcher at Xerox India, Saurabh has been crafting technologies that could help people with limited literacy use online services by speaking into phones or making gestures picked up by inexpensive cameras.

This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here.