This is a story that will leave our TechGig readers inspired for sure.
Nikay Kulkarni, a Nashik-based self-taught programmer put technology to great use when he solved one of the pressing problems faced in his city. When he was just 15-year old he built a tech solution to manage India’s Kumbh Mela, the world’s largest congregation of religious pilgrims at one location.
Isn’t that a great use of technology? Using it to our advantage and solving real-world problems that we face.
Nilay was deeply affected by a news on how 39 people had died in a stampede during Nashik Kumbh Mela. All he needed was an opportunity to prove his mettle. And that opportunity came in the form of KumbhaThon, a hackathon event organized by MIT Media Lab in 2014.
Using the power of analytics, Nilay and his team collected data around the number of attendees at the Kumbh Mela, the precise location where crowds tend to build up, the rate of people/minute to predict stampedes and alert authorities.
His invention was a simple pressure-sensitive mat to count footfalls and analyse the data to track crowd density. Quite like the incremental iterative methods that one would relate with an Agile software development methodology, trials were conducted by Nilay and his team on the prototype that they had developed. That led to the birth of…
Nilay is now the co-founder and CTO of Ashioto Analytics, an IoT platform to help crowd management evolve from being intuition-driven to data-driven. His innovative product, Ashioto mats can be connected to a Bluetooth-enabled communication box, placed in a way that could help gather vital insights.
This phenomenal success achieved by this young programmer has now even prompted the Central Railways to consider using these floor mats at strategic locations to accurately assess the passenger footfalls and take preventive measures.