And what gets your attention straight away is the context. This is not your high school science project for which a participation certificate lies ahead; it is a state-of-the-art smart cane that talks, senses the environment, tracks a person’s vital signs, and alerts for help if the person falls down.
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All of this was designed and created, mostly manually, by a 10-year old kid! What Aaradhya has made, the smart cane STAMBHA, can do three jobs at once which are considered three different products in the world of assistive technology: sensing the environment using laser rangefinder and camera, allowing the visually challenged individual to just ask the cane questions, and monitoring the vitals of the person all the while.
Ask it if your walk is steady, and it will not just tell you, but answer you on the basis of its own records of yours. STAMBHA isn’t a medical device and makes no diagnostic claim. It’s a working prototype built to notice change, not to treat or diagnose anything.
The origin story is simple. “First, there are two things I got this idea from,” Aaradhya told us. “First was when I was watching movie Srikanth, a true story about a businessman who was visually impaired… And second, I got when I was small, my grandparents used to check on me, like, was I warm? Was I safe? But then they got old and nobody used to check on them.” Her conclusion, had the plainness only a child can manage to have, “life should be held all the way through, not just at the beginning.”
What’s even more remarkable is that she managed to come up with the one aspect of design for this product which made it most ingenious by recognizing the difference between tripping and falling down, which is the reason why people give up on such gadgets. And she figured this out herself without talking to any visually impaired people.
“I didn’t talk to visually impaired people,” she said. “When I was watching movies, I felt like a lot of visually impaired people would feel. And then one time I tested on my own. I just closed my eyes and tried walking. Naturally, I was banging everywhere.”
She tested the finished device on the people closest to her instead, “my parents, grandparents, my elder sister,” never on friends or classmates. It’s a research method no product manager would greenlight, and yet it produced a thoughtful piece of hardware.
All of this didn’t happen in a vacuum, and it’s to her credit that Aaradhya does not make any such claims. Aaradhya had her uncle, Nitin Jain, CTO of ShareChat, and father sitting right beside her throughout much of the process. “The most difficult part,” as Aaradhya puts it, of the soldering of the ESP32-S3 microcontroller in the cane is something that she merely observed.
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The coding, however, has been reliant on AI-based programming tools, according to Nitin, with about 80% of the coding done using Claude. “Because coding has become slightly more accessible,” Nitin said, “if you have the concept, if you have the idea, you can do it.”
What makes STAMBHA worth taking note of, besides the fact that it was built by a kid? This is the ultimate example of what an interested 10-year-old can build today with the help of large language models dealing with the components, API integrations, boilerplate, and debugging that would otherwise take years of engineering experience to even try to accomplish.
Still, Aaradhya needed to understand her sensors, still needed to experiment until she could mount them correctly (“whenever I put the sensor, they used to just get malfunction,” she said of the early builds), still needed to decide what the device should detect and when it shouldn’t react to something. The insight wasn’t invented by the AI – it was invented by her, right in her house, with her eyes closed.
There’s something almost old-fashioned about how she talks about success, too. Asked what winning looks like for her, she didn’t mention scale, funding, or a company. “My goal is to make it reach the right people,” she said. “I built this for the right people. So, I can just give them… being a part of the world.”
STAMBHA is not vapourware. In between August 25 to September 23, Aaradhya tested this system 16 times, which generated more than 22,600 sensor records, more than 8,500 obstacles records and almost 20,000 balancing records, transforming “my niece built a cane” to something closer to an actual trial.
The system costs around $100 against $850 to $1,150 of the commercially available smart canes. She presented it at the United Nations Conference Centre, Bangkok on September 25, and the next step is to try the system with real elderly and visually challenged people and redesign it according to their feedback.
There’s an obvious cynicism that comes with tales of “child prodigy”. But there’s a little less cynicism involved when talking about a girl who shut her eyes, knocked into her own furniture, and spent a year building a system to solve that problem. For her and STAMBHA, sky is the limit.
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