Meet Ayush Gharat, Bengaluru Student Who Built An App To Care For Malnourished Kids

Ayush Gharat is just in Std 9 in the Head Start Educational Academy in Bangalore, and yet he's already a certified Associate Android Developer.

He's unfortunately keenly aware of India's vast poor population, so he decided to develop a solution to help in one way he can.

Gharat has designed a software solution to help keep India's financially bereft children fed. His creation, mNutrition, offers organisations a way to ensure children on the streets receive enough food, and more so that any signs of malnutrition can be quickly detected and dealt with.

Malnutrition is the leading cause of child mortality in India. According to the World Bank, 44 percent of children in our country under the age of 5 are severely malnourished. Because of this, they're also susceptible to disease, and their ability to learn is stunted, further worsening their situation.

mNutrition therefore looks to be an easy-access platform for health workers to detect malnutrition early, so they can pinpoint which children are in most need of care.

In order to be easy to obtain and use, Gharat has designed mNutrition as an easily downloaded smartphone app. Health workers can use it to input relevant medical details like age, sex, height, weight, etc. It then uses the WHO's 2006 calculation tables to detect whether a child is grossly under weight, and therefore malnourished.

It's designed in such a way that local community workers and volunteers can use the app easily, even if they're not literate. The app also stores each child's medical information, and can be used to monitor treatment with antibiotics and food supplements, as well as the kid's responses to the drugs.

This makes mNutrition an ideal tool for use in rural or remote areas, where professionals may not be available to attend to the children and where resources and access to healthcare might be limited or expensive.

The app is a huge step up from current monitoring methods, which rely on tracking observations on paper and with archaic filing systems. mNutrition instead uses a cloud storage system, and is compatible with Android, iOS, and web apps.

"In the long run, the success of the programs led by the government highly depends on successful implementation by the health workers," Gharat writes in his report. "A technological innovation such as mNutrition being used as a mobile calculator, helps the children being screened correctly and reliably in a short period of time."

Gharat is currently one of the top 100 regional finalists of the Google Science Fair 2018-2019. It's a competition where students work towards environmental, social, and economical betterment using science and technology.