Indian Students Win Awards At US Inventors Competition

Bengaluru boy, Sarthak Srinivas, a computer science student at Atlanta's Georgia Institute of Technology shone at the Collegiate Inventors Competition awards held at Alexandria(Virginia) on Friday. He developed augmented reality platform ‘Oculogx’ along with Charu Thomas, a third-year industrial engineering student at Georgia Institute of Technology. Locating products in large warehouses can be very difficult and time-consuming and Oculogx could be the right tool for it. Sarthak explained that Oculogx helps find and pick products or orders at large warehouses by using Microsoft's HoloLens and Google Glass. There are 7,50,000 warehouses across the world, of which many are huge, hence their technology is extremely relevant. It could be used for three crucial things - barcode scanning, indoor navigation to a particular product and highlighting individual shelves in warehouses. The annual competition that encourages innovation, entrepreneurship, and creativity among college students saw six Indian or Indian-origin students showcasing their innovations. Pooja Nair (John Hopkins University) and her co-inventors won silver in the undergraduate category for developing a device that can be worn in the nose and aids in breathing by expanding the nasal passages. Ashwinraj Karthikeyan from the University of Virginia bagged the bronze for Phoenix-Aid, a five-layer bandage that accelerates healing of chronic wounds, particularly in diabetes patients. Archana Gujjari (Texas State University) has co-invented a water purification tool for the oil and gas industry. Praveen Kumar Reddy won bronze for his innovation that reinforces structures (like bridges) by strengthening joints and enabling them to take more load.