Medical device design — assistive and diagnostic hardware.
I build assistive medical hardware, and I am interested in why so little of it reaches patients. The device is rarely the hard part. The path from a working prototype to something a health system will actually buy and use is where most of these projects stop, including mine.
A wearable lower-limb assistive exoskeleton. My M.Tech thesis at IIT Hyderabad, 2025–26, supervised by Dr Safvan Palathingal and Prof. Renu John.
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The design problem came from a month of clinical immersion at Kamineni Hospital, L.B. Nagar, in December 2024 — orthopaedic and neurology wards, most working days, around 180 hours in total. Patients recovering from stroke or orthopaedic injury depend on a model that does not scale: one physiotherapist, a few patients per session, and no record of what happens between visits.
The device runs two ESP32 controllers talking over I²C. A time-of-flight sensor on the shin gives a continuous velocity estimate; IMUs supply orientation and gait phase. Together they drive assistive torque during the swing phase. Housings are 3-D printed, thigh links are CNC-machined aluminium, and a browser dashboard logs gait data continuously rather than only moving the leg.
It did not reach anyone. Getting to production needed roughly ₹5 crore in pre-seed capital against established competition, and that money was not available. The venture was wound down and the technology transferred to IIT Hyderabad under institute policy. A device that worked, at a fraction of the imported price, for a market of tens of thousands of patients in India — and none of that was enough. Working out what the gap is actually made of is what I want to do next.
Biodesign, clinical immersion, device standards and regulation, and IP at IIT Hyderabad. Biostatistics and research methodology, and pharmaceutical jurisprudence, at SPPU. Before that, regulatory affairs (FDA and EMA dossiers), quality assurance under GMP, and market research using surveys and focus groups.