LONDON: Can you be ambitiously enterprising and yet warm the cockles of people’s hearts? Can you have a goal for individual success that goes hand in hand with a vision for uplifting humanity? The stories of social entrepreneur Neeti Kailas and four others, who have been chosen as young laureates of the Rolex Awards for Enterprise (RAE) 2014, say an emphatic yes. The recipients for the award were announced at The Royal Society, London on June 24.
Twenty-nine-year-old Neeti, a National Institute of Design graduate, has created a device that helps detect hearing impairment in infants. Her project is of immense significance because early detection becomes the difference between the child being able to talk and living her/his entire life with a speech disability. Giving Neeti the momentum required to make her device available in the mainstream and accessible to all in a vast and populous country like India is RAE, which gives the award winners 50,000 Swiss Francs (approx `33.5 lakh), apart from help with publicising their cause internationally through media campaigns and access to Rolex’s network of previous award winners and jury members who are experts in their fields.
Take a peek at the five inspirational projects and learn a bit about the brains behind them.
Indian born Neeti Kailas’ schooling was similar to that of many of us; she was educated at Kendriya Vidyalaya, spending some years of it at the IIT campus in Chennai. She then completed a Graduate Diploma in Product Design at The National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad (2002-2006), the final year of which she spent at The Pforzheim University of Applied Sciences in Pforzheim, Germany, as an exchange student. She then completed her MS in Industrial Design from the Art Center College of Design, California, United States (2009-2011) on a scholarship, and went on to acquire business skills at INSEAD in Paris with an MBA (2011) as an exchange student. In between she worked as a Design Strategist and Consultant for Nestle Purina North America, Nestle SA and 3M, and then went to set up Sohum Innovation Lab in January 2012 with her husband Nitin Sisodia.
Through her formative years, Neeti says she has always thought in terms of “creating an impact in society”. She says having studied in a school with kids from various backgrounds and shifting from one place to another with her family gave her a wider perspective of life in India, and made her want to give back to the society through the skills she acquired by education. Starting from the bedpans she designed as part of a project at NID, while her classmates were designing pretty things for people’s living rooms, to the device to detect hearing loss in infants, Neeti’s inclination to finding solutions for humanity’s problems are evident.
Every year, at least one lakh children are born in India with hearing disabilities. Among them was a childhood friend of Neeti’s who, in a way, sparked her interest in this project. Not only are existing tests expensive and require skilled healthcare workers, public awareness is very low. It is essential to test early, as deafness can become a hurdle to the development of cognition, speech and language even in infants as young as six months of age. The device Neeti designed works by measuring the child’s auditory brainstem response using three electrodes which are placed on the baby’s head. The electrodes detect electrical responses generated by the brain’s auditory system.
If the electrodes do not detect any response when aurally stimulated, it means that the child cannot hear.
A simple, inexpensive and portable device, it is battery operated and non-invasive unlike existing devices and, therefore, does not require the child to be sedated to conduct the test. “Another of the device’s major advantages over other testing systems is our patented, in-built algorithm that filters out ambient noise from the test signal,” says Neeti, who has kept in mind the atmosphere in the routinely crowded, noisy clinics in the country, while designing the prototype.
With the Rolex funds, Neeti hopes to start clinical trials later this year, and start screening in 2017, first focusing on 2 per cent of hospital births and scaling up annually.
Neeti knows she has her work cut out. Stating that Tamil Nadu tops the incidence of speech loss (due to hearing impairment), possibly because marriage within families is common, she says it is important to create awareness and remove any social stigma associated with the disability. “We also need to figure out ways to collaborate individually with hospitals and also keep all the stakeholders interested in testing,” she says, informing us that Goa and Kerala have already shown interest.
A confident Neeti, when asked what she sees her venture achieving within her lifetime, she says “We will prevent speech loss in every child.” She hopes that her project can be adapted for screening newborns for impaired vision, or for identifying high-risk pregnancies.