Nilay Kulkarni: Ashioto
Ashioto — footstep-counting mats for crowd safety at the Kumbh Mela.
Nashik's 2003 Kumbh Mela stampede killed 39 people. At MIT Media Lab's Kumbhathon in 2014, Kulkarni asked what data the police actually had at the moment of decision, and found the answer was none in real time. Ashioto is a rubber mat with a matrix of piezoelectric pressure switches; each footfall is counted and a microcontroller sends people-per-minute figures to a dashboard so officers can re-route crowds before density becomes dangerous. It counted about 500,000 people over 18 hours across five exit routes at the 2015 Kumbh.
IP note
Company Ashioto Analytics (defunct); code released open source; no patent.
Recognition
Counted ~5 lakh people at Kumbh 2015; TED talk 2018.
What this means for a student inventor in India
[Editor: 120–200 words connecting this story to the Indian route — Section 6 (any true inventor may apply), provisional vs complete specification, disclosure at fairs (Section 31), renewals, and who owns what when a school is involved. Link to the relevant MYCrave guide.]
Related young innovators
- Trisha Prabhu — ReThink
- Nick D'Aloisio — Summly
- Kavya Kopparapu — Eyeagnosis and GlioVision
Sources
[Editor: list the 2–4 primary sources from the research notes for this entry, with the date checked.]
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