Maya, 17 Wins Top Intel Prize

    • rohit.david@timesgroup.com
    • Publish Date: Aug 11 2016 11:52AM
    • |
    • Updated Date: Aug 15 2016 1:42PM
Maya, 17 Wins Top Intel Prize

Maya Varma built a smartphone-based apparatus to diagnose five diseases, including asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which affects 64-odd million people worldwide. The student of San Jose's Presentation High School developed the project at home under the mentorship of a professor at Johns Hopkins University. Excerpts from an interview:


Q How did it all start?
I read a World Health Organisation report which said that the prevalence of respiratory diseases such as asthma, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), restrictive lung disease, emphysema, and chronic bronchitis has been growing rapidly around the world over in the past few decades. Some 600 million people worldwide have some form of respiratory illness, COPD being the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer. These illnesses are diagnosed by a device called spirometer, which determines lung function by measuring the volume of air that a patient expels.  Current spirometers used to diagnose these respiratory illnesses cost thousands of dollars, which makes them too expensive for use in developing nations. As a result, 75 per cent of those afflicted with COPD are receiving no medical treatment.  It is not surprising that almost 90 per cent of all pulmonary illness-related deaths occur in developing nations as a result of the lack of access to affordable diagnostic equipment. 

Q What was on your mind? 
Primarily, the costs had to be kept down. I designed a low-cost smartphone-based pulmonary function analyzer that could be used to diagnose and manage the five respiratory illnesses listed above. The system includes a 3D printed mouthpiece in which the patient exhales, an electronics board that processes the data, and an Android application that graphs incoming data and interprets results. Test results showed that my system was able to detect and classify symptoms of five different respiratory diseases accurately. What’s more, the total cost of the machine was under $35. In the long run, this would make the system affordable even in the poorest countries, where the majority of respiratory disease patients lack access to diagnostic equipment.

Q Was there any other project you had worked on in the past?
I have been fascinated with microcontrollers from a young age.  I started working with my first Arduino board (open-source platform for building electronics projects) in the six grade. When I was in the eighth grade, I created a novel and cost-effective foot neuropathy analyser to enable early detection of neuropathy in diabetic patients. This project won the grand prize at the California State Science Fair, among many other awards.  The success of this project made me realise that it was possible to develop cheap devices that could replace some of the expensive diagnostic equipment currently used in medicine. I came up with the idea for this pulmonary function analyser two years ago when one of my close friends had an asthma attack and was taken to hospital. Later she told me that the doctors had used a spirometer to check her lung function. My research on lung function testing exposed me to the plight of millions in the world who do not have access to respiratory diseases because of the high cost of diagnostic equipment.

Q What has been the response to your invention?
It’s been been positive. I'm so humbled by all the recognition my project has received over the past two years. I received a research grant from the Cogito programme at CTY Johns Hopkins that helped me to purchase material and start the initial research. Since then, I have won the first place in the innovation category at Intel STS, Grand Prize in the high-school category at Sigma Xi Research Showcase, Grand Prize at the Synopsys Silicon Valley Science Fair, first place in the engineering category at the National Junior Science and Humanities Symposium, FIRST Future Innovator Award, and regional finalist in the Google Science Fair. My work has also been recognised by the World Bank and Disney as well as featured on NBC and in Popular Mechanics magazine.

 
Q What do you have to say about the Intel award?
I received the first place award at the Intel STS competition earlier this year with a $150,000 college scholarship as well. I had absolutely no idea that I would be selected, so it was a huge surprise. I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to participate in Intel STS, meet other finalists, and share my research - it was truly one of the most rewarding and extraordinary experiences of my life.

Q What do you plan to do next? 
I am currently working on a self-navigating robotic wheelchair that will be controlled by a smartphone app and Bluetooth Beacon technology. With the aging population in the US, use of assistive devices by people who have mobility impairments is rapidly increasing. My objective in this project is to come up with a highly autonomous wheelchair robot with the help of readily available and low-cost technology. The wheelchair is controlled by an Android app running on the user's smartphone, which can accept voice commands and navigate autonomously to a specified destination in an indoor environment.


Her invention 
She has built a device out of $35 worth of basic electronics, but it is as accurate as hospital-grade versions that cost hundreds and even thousands of dollars. She hopes it will save lives in developing countries where such a device — called a spirometer — might otherwise be inaccessible. Physicians can use data from Varma’s invention to diagnose and manage chronic pulmonary illnesses such as asthma or emphysema. Patients blow into the device, and a smartphone app analyzes the results. Varma developed the app: She is proficient in five programming languages.

Other winners
Amol Punjabi, 17, won first place for basic research for developing software that can help pharmaceutical companies develop new drugs to treat cancer and heart disease. He is from Marlborough, Mass.

Paige Brown, 17, won first place for projects dedicated to the global good. She is developing a water filter to remove phosphate from stormwater systems. Sheis from Bangor, Maine.
 

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Comments

S.H Ashmitha Dayanand Anglo Vedic Public School, Airoli - Navi

pls keep on gooooing

Annada Dash KENDRIYA VIDYALAYA -PANVEL

Keep up

R.M.ROHIT NAIR Rosary School, Warje

WORK HARD YOU WILL ACHIEVE MORE

Ronit.R National Hill View Public School

well done

Nidhi Shetty Veer Bhagat Singh Vidyalaya, Malad

She is surely gonna be young minds ideal role model.

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