A 19-Year-Old Harsh Songra has developed a mobile app ‘My Child’ which helps parents in early diagnosis of developmental disorder among their children. Bhopal-based Harsh has developed this app with the help of his childhood friends and now his Co founders Aafreen Ansari and Shreya Shrivastava. Something that's more intriguing than a 19-year-old making a revolutionary app in healthcare section is the fact that, Harsh himself is a victim of the problem he’s addressing today. Harsh was diagnosed with Dyspraxia when he was 11 years old. Dyspraxia which is a form of developmental coordination disorder (DCD) is a disorder that affects fine and/or gross motor coordination. He made the app in order to raise awareness as well as diagnose the symptoms of developmental disorders as early as possible, right from the 24th month of the childbirth.
In India, 13 to 14 percent of all school children suffer from one or the other kind of learning disability. And like most of the parents, Harsh’s parents were also unable to identify problems in their son’s development.
However, Harsh Clarifies, that this app is not trying to replace doctors, but is meant as a reference point about disorders from which the child may be suffering from. He adds that the idea behind the app is to empower parents with technology and also to ease the burdern of doctors.
Harsh is currently in his second-year computer science engineering and is a huge admirer of Elon Musk Founder of Tesla Motors. In India, he regularly interacts with Shashank N D of Practo, Lalit Mangal of Commonfloor and Ravi Gururaj, a serial entrepreneur, a business mentor and chair of the Nasscom Product Council who is also apparently mentoring the child prodigy.
The app collects data from parents like height, weight, etc. And then asks a series of questions with Yes or No option. The entire process takes 45 secs and based on the response it recommends possible areas of concern for a child and also recommends the actions to be taken.
At present, ‘My Child’ app has a 4.2 rating on Google Play with 5000 downloads.
Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg recently put the teen on the world map by applauding him and his startup on the social media. Harsh has already enrolled for the FBStart Program which is a program designed by Facebook to help early stage mobile startups build and grow their apps. Sheryl Said, "We're supporting developers like Harsh who have great ideas but can't always access the resources they need."
Pankaj Jain, Partner, 500 Startups says, “Getting information about developmental disorders and details on whom to speak with on a simple mobile app just by answering few simple questions is transformative.”
At present, My Child team has total five members and ironically the teams average age is also 19. My Child recently secured $100k in a seed round from a group of Angel Investors in India led by 500 Startups including Samir Bangara, Anisha Mittal, Amit Gupta, Pallav Nadhani, Lalit Mangal, Arihant Patni, Dr. Ritesh Malik, Deobrat Singh, Saurabh Paruthi and Singapore Angel Network.
Harsh states that funds will be used to improve the technology and the entire development of the app. He has plans to make the app into a preventive tool and as a go-to guide for parents.
Harsh is our true inspiring chatur and what he has accomplished in such a young age will inspire many young entrepreneurs in improving the quality of human life and health care sector overall.
The global statistics of children suffering from such developmental disorder is alarming, what's even more threatening is little empathy and understanding on the subject. Harsh also wants his app to transform into a help guide for the mother during pregnancy to prevent her child from unexpected disorders he wishes to empower the parents with the ability to track their child’s development easily by getting all the red flags on time. We are proud that we have young entrepreneurs like Harsh Songra in our country.
