IDuring the blissful summer that Hemesh Chadalavada spent with his grandmother in 2018, the couple watched endless movies and ate her chicken biryani. Late one evening, as Chadalavada, then 12, sat alone in front of the television, Jayasree got up in her nightgown and went to make tea at her home in Guntur, southern India.
After returning to her bedroom, Chadalavada went to the kitchen and discovered that his grandmother, then 63, had left the gas on.
“She had recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, but I was still in shock. What would have happened if I hadn’t been there?” says Chadalavada.
Chadalavada knew Jayasree as both a loving grandmother and a dynamic, successful woman, who had a high-profile career as a civil servant and interacted with top politicians and policymakers in the state of Telangana.
But Alzheimer’s disease changed her completely. He says: “She used to get up at three or four in the morning and go out, thinking she was on the train.”
During that happy summer, Chadalavada, a self-proclaimed nerd from Hyderabad who loved robotics, decided he wanted to invent a gadget to help people like his grandmother.
Chadalavada, now 17 years old, is about to produce a device that detects when people with Alzheimer’s disease fall or wander, which is beyond the reach of the devices currently available.
The light and compact Alpha Monitor, which can be worn as a badge or bracelet, sounds an alarm when the wearer begins to move and alerts a caregiver if the patient falls or wanders off.
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Most similar devices run on WiFi or Bluetooth, so when a person moves outside the limited range of their frequencies, the connection is lost and with it the monitoring. But the Alpha Monitor can detect a person more than a mile away in cities and five miles in rural areas thanks to long-range technology known as LoRait uses.
Chadalavada taught himself robotics and electronics through YouTube videos and developed 20 prototypes.
To understand the needs of people with Alzheimer's disease (of which India an estimated 8.8 million), he spent time at a day center run by the Alzheimer's and Related Disorders Society of India.
There, the co-founder of the local association, A Bala Tripura Sundari, told him that the device had to be “something light that could be worn on any part of the body.” She says, “Many patients don't like having to wear a watch and take it off.”
Bala's father had Alzheimer's disease and would hop into auto-rickshaws and travel for miles before his family realized he was gone.
The stories Chadalavada heard and the death last year of his inspiration Jayasree strengthened his drive, despite his heavy workload at school.
“There was a family who searched for their father for two years after he wandered off. They never found him. Eventually they gave up,” he says.
The monitor also measures heart rate and temperature and reminds people when to take medication. But Chadalavada is working to take his invention even further, to predict a patient's movement patterns machine learning technology.
In 2022, he beat 18,000 entries to win a 10 million rupee (£100,000) grant from the Samsung Solve for Tomorrow competition and was assigned some of Samsung's top engineers as mentors.
Chadalavada makes inventing sound like fun because it comes naturally to him. He was 12 when he built a 'heat detector' to check the temperatures of friends while they played cricket.
“We all enjoyed playing cricket, even in the summer heat, but many of my friends got sick,” he says. “I wanted something that allowed us to maximize our fun by playing for as long as possible, by knowing when to stop because our bodies were overheating.”
In March, when Chadalavada's school exams are over, he will put the finishing touches to the monitor, with the aim of having the device ready for the market in September. He believes it should be sold at an affordable price for most people.
Chadalavada hopes to study robotics at a university abroad. His goal is simple: “I want to make products to help people in India for the whole world.”