Name : Navkumar Awasthi
District & State : Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh
Category : Utility
Award : Consolation
Award Function : 9th National Grassroots Innovation Awards
Award Year : 2017
Innovator Profile
Navkumar (50) is a motor mechanic and himself a hearing and speech impaired person. Being a mechanic he had a lot of problem understanding the sound of the vehicle, hence he has thought of a hand band with visual indicators for the sound and is in the process of developing it. This would be attached to a six channel electronic stethoscope.
His father was a freedom fighter and had the same impairment. He completed his studies as a motor mechanic in an ITI and started working as a motor mechanic in a local service centre. Initially he faced a lot of problems in communicating with people and understanding the sounds of the motor vehicle, so he had to come up with innovative ideas to help himself. In due course, he conceived ideas for a vibration horn, sign to text converter, and speech to text converter as well. He has wife and a son in his family.
Being hearing and speech impaired Navkumar had to face a lot of problem trying to understand and deciphering the problem in vehicle’s engine. To help him with this, he embedded a Digital Storage Oscilloscope (DSO)* with a six channel electronic stethoscope**, which displays the sound coming from the vehicle in form of graphs, which was easy for him to understand. However, the setup was quite bulky for him to carry around whenever needed. Hence, he started thinking of a compact wrist/hand band, which would have a LED & a small screen for graphical display.