From everyday aids to advanced systems, assistive technology is undergoing a quiet transformation. As N. Ramakrishnan highlights, a new wave of innovation is redefining not just accessibility, but what independence itself can look like.
A clutch of start-ups is now working to help people with disabilities lead lives that are as close to normal as possible. At the heart of this shift is assistive technology—an emerging domain where deep tech is being used to build products and services that enable greater independence.
The simple spectacles you wear to improve your eyesight, the hearing aid that helps you hear better, and the walking stick that aids your walk… these are all common examples of what is better known as assistive technology. But the world of assistive technology has changed dramatically over the last couple of decades, now including both physical and digital products and apps.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) defines assistive technology as the application of knowledge and skills related to assistive products and services. The WHO says an assistive product is either specially produced or available, “The primary purpose of which is to maintain or improve an individual’s functioning and independence and thereby promote their well-being.”
These assistive products cover devices, equipment, instruments, and software in six broad categories – mobility, vision, hearing, communication, cognition, and self-care. They could be wheelchairs, spectacles, and hearing aids, and digital products such as software and apps. At one level, the spell check facility on your computer or laptop is an assistive technology as it helps those with spelling difficulties or dyslexia type without mistakes. Before touch screen mobile phones became the norm, there were the Qwerty phones that used to have a dot in the middle, which was meant to help visually challenged persons figure out the keys.
“Anything which helps us become more functionally enabled is assistive technology. It is a wide concept. We use it in the context of people with disabilities or the elderly population,” says Prateek Madhav, Co- founder and CEO, AssisTechFoundation, which is building an assistive technology innovation ecosystem to support and promote disability-focused start-ups. From just a handful of innovators in this space about five to six years back, the number has grown significantly now, according to him. It runs incubation and acceleration programmes. It has a portfolio of over 65 start-ups with more than 120 products
Besides, ATF is part of a global alliance +N, Inclusive Innovation Network, which is a community of innovators, accelerators, and investors that is working towards improving the impact of technology on disability inclusion.
Solving for the world from India
Through this network, says Prateek, ATF will have access to more than 1,200 start-ups. The Western world has always built assistive technology, but one that is limited in its approach. India is unique in that nearly 70% of the people with disabilities live in rural areas. The issue then becomes how to distribute the technology evenly. “India is thinking of building technology which is catering to a large mass. India’s problems are India’s opportunities. We are sitting at the cusp of India building assistive technology not just for 80-90 million people in the country but probably attempting to serve a billion or more people across the globe,” says Prateek.
The start-ups in India range across categories. Some help the visually challenged read text in the language of their choice, some cater to people with mobility problems, and there are those that help the blind make sure they are dispensing the right currency notes while doing a transaction.
Assistive technology may be a new nomenclature, but the start-ups straddle different sectors such as medical tech (MedTech) or education technology (EdTech). Assistive Tech, points out Prateek, is a domain like MedTech and EdTech, but deep tech is at the heart of all these categories.
A few examples
Take the case of SparshMind Innovations. Founded by three engineering graduates who met at an AIIMS Fellowship, SparshMind has built a product using virtual reality for rehabilitation purposes for stroke patients. At the core of the rehabilitation is hyper-customisation for the patient’s requirement, says Harikrishnan M, CEO and Co-founder, SparshMind Innovations, who has a Master’s in Product Design and Manufacturing from IISc after completing his mechanical engineering from Saintgits College of Engineering in Kerala.
Virtual reality, he points out, gives that flexibility to customise to a patient’s needs. Stroke rehabilitation requires movement, speech therapy, and cognition, which can be achieved with VR. SparshMind Innovation buys the VR headsets off-the-shelf, integrates its proprietary software onto a tablet, and sells the complete package—the VR headset, the tablet, and the software interface—to rehabilitation centres.
The software can assess patients on 13 parameters, including range, speed, coordination, and balance. There are more than 50 activities grouped into seven categories, such as repetitive task training, activities of daily living, balance, cognitive, lower body related, and specialised modules for different conditions.
According to him, SparshMind’s product is at the cusp of both medical technology and assistive technology. “It is in the middle of these two, where medical technology is focused on patients who need assistance,” he adds.
Amey Desai, an engineering graduate from BITS Pilani, teamed up with his gastroenterologist father, Dr. Devendra Desai, to start Lifespark Technologies, which has developed a wearable mobility aid to help patients with Parkinson’s, spinal cord injuries, stroke, and other chronic neurological conditions. The band reduces freezing of gait, slowness, and falls in patients with Parkinson’s, says Amey. It uses muscle stimulation to improve coordination while walking. With the help of sensors, the device collects data and tracks symptoms that may lead to falls.
According to Amey, the company’s wearable band stimulates the quadriceps and the hamstrings, and a series of stimulations thereon helps the patient’s walking improve. The system allows the walking apparatus to engage even with reduced signal from the muscle neurons, he says.
In the case of Soumita Basu, it was a personal problem that turned her into an entrepreneur, a unique one at that. She is the Founder and CEO of Zyenika Adaptive Clothing. Due to an autoimmune disease, Soumita was bedridden for nearly four years. She could not dress properly. More importantly, she found it extremely difficult to change her clothes.
Soumita says that, like her mother, she was fond of dressing nicely, but that became difficult when she was bedridden. “I couldn’t move anything, I couldn’t even roll on my bed or turn sides. Getting dressed was a big problem, and that was something I could not avoid,” she says. She started reading up on what she could do and was determined to design clothing that people with conditions similar to hers could use.
You ask her how the clothes she makes help those with mobility issues. For example, she says, a person has a back problem and cannot bend. With Zyenika’s range of pants that have hanging loops, the pants will go all the way down, the person has to put their feet in, and the person can pull the pants up with the loops. The company has also designed a pant that can be worn by those in wheelchairs, and they wouldn’t have to remove the pant to use a toilet.
She is convinced that there is a large enough market for such adaptive clothing. However, there may not be too much awareness about these products in the market. There is a shift happening.
Harshesh Gokani, a mechanical engineer from NIT Karnataka, was working in a global automotive company in Chennai and had to undergo physiotherapy when he pulled a muscle while out on a run. At the rehabilitation centre, he noticed a few others who had even more serious problems and where the physiotherapists spent a lot of their time helping the patients do routine tasks rather than explaining to the patients what to do and watching them do it on their own.
“A lot of the effort of the physiotherapist was going into making sure the exercises were done right. This could easily be done by a robot,” says Harshesh. If the robots took over the task of assisting or helping the patients do their exercises, the physiotherapists would be able to spend a lot more time with the patients, motivating them, checking if they were doing it right, and even teaching them new exercises.
This was the spark for him to start his own venture, forHealth, that has developed a robot that can help patients do both upper body and lower limb exercises, making the task of physiotherapists much easier. “Our device works across mobility, flexibility, and assisted strengthening. It has close to 250 upper limb and lower limb exercises. It can be used lying down, sitting down, or standing,” says Harshesh.
In the early stages, the device can judge a patient’s effort and assist. Once there is some progress, the device will even offer some resistance so that the patients have to put in effort.
Funding options
All of them—Harikrishnan of SparshMind Innovations, Amey of Lifespark Technologies, Soumita of Zyenika and Harshesh of forHealth—are convinced that the market for these assisted technology products is large in India and they will be able to tap the global market too. Harshesh says the market for the robots that forHealth makes is around $10 billion globally, of which Asia-Pacific alone will be a fourth.
According to Shruti Devasthali, Head – Funding and Investment, Venture Center, there are several funding options for start-ups in the assistive technology space, including various government grants, corporate social responsibility funding through incubators, and from foundations such as the Tata Trust, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Angel investors and angel investment networks are also willing to invest in these ventures at a really early stage.
Grants are easier if the market size is small, the markets are fragmented, or if market penetration is difficult. If there are multiple applications of the technology, then fundraising is easier, according to her.
Shruti says that Venture Center is keen to support start-ups in the assistive technology space by investing in them and making available high-quality facilities and expertise for prototyping, the stage at which many start-ups in the space struggle the most to raise funds. “As a science and technology-based incubator, we see Venture Center playing a role in nurturing innovations and novel technology interventions that significantly change the current availability, accessibility, and affordability of products to the disabled. Venture Center also helps to translate technologies from publicly funded research institutions,” she says.
Harikrishnan of SparshMind Innovations says they raised funding from angel investors and seed funding from Venture Center, while Amey of Lifespark Technologies says that venture capital interest definitely exists for a field such as theirs. It also depends on how well the companies are able to deploy the technology to a larger use case.
According to Prateek, funding for start-ups in the assistive technology space has to be more from patient capital rather than venture capital, which has a fixed time cycle. Assistive tech is a different asset class, and the only people who traditionally look at it are foundations, grants, and CSR funds. “We are talking about patient capital rather than venture capital. It will probably take 7–10 years before we get the return on investment,” says Prateek.
Things are changing, he adds. There are now companies and impact funds that are looking at these ventures, since they closely resemble the MedTech space. “For example,” he says, “intelligent physiotherapy is assistive technology but also medical technology. There are intersections like this where there is a robot plus an app that is AI-driven, that is, helping not just do physiotherapy but also automating it and helping data to predict what could be done for the next session. There are a few bright spots; more needs to be done. A lot of start-ups need to find more growth funding.”
An interesting development, says Prateek, is that a number of these start-ups have started patenting their technologies. A lot of these technologies have adjacencies in other sectors. One of the companies incubated by AssisTech Foundation helps translate text to voice for blind people for educational purposes. The company uses an AI-based intelligent OCR that can also be used by senior citizens and in the financial services sector, where a lot of insurance documents have to be made searchable. It can also be used in the legal sector. There are adjacencies that are being leveraged and that way their IP becomes more valuable, points out Prateek.
About the Author :
N. Ramakrishnan
N. Ramakrishnan is an independent journalist with over three decades of experience covering business, industry, and India’s evolving start-up ecosystem. He has written extensively on entrepreneurship, innovation, and emerging technologies, bringing attention to the people and ideas shaping the country’s innovation landscape.
He is the author of CanDid: Inspiring Human Stories of Resilience, Perseverance & Focus from Sciencepreneurs at Venture Center, a book that captures the journeys of science-based entrepreneurs incubated at Venture Center. In addition to authoring CanDid, Ramakrishnan contributes articles and features that explore the challenges, opportunities, and perspectives emerging from India’s deep tech and start-up ecosystem, including the present feature.