UG Students in Google Solutions Challenge Top 10

2 Undergraduate students from NTU, College of Engineering - Ritik Bhatia (SCSE -Computer Science, Year 4) and Aishik Nagar (EEE, Year 4) have made it to the Google Top Ten. Here’s what they have to say on their journey.

When we heard about Google Solution Challenge 2021 and its theme - UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, we decided to submit DementiCare under “Good health and well-being” category. We knew that a big platform would enable greater social good by reaching out to a wider audience.

Dementia is a widespread disease with over 17 billion hours spent caring for patients in the US alone. Our team had close relatives suffering from Dementia and so we had first-hand experience about several problems of caregiving for Dementia patients. Upon further research, we were shocked to know about the increasing trends of Alzheimer’s related cases and deaths worldwide. This inspired us to make DementiCare.

We spent several days researching the daily pain points of Dementia patients and their caregivers. For reliable data, we conducted talks with professional caregiving organizations like Alzheimer’s Disease Association and Allium Healthcare, and even consulted relevant friends and family members.

The real-world experience and opinions aided us in developing features to alleviate specific problems. For eg. sending urgent notices, chatbots and professional advice for caregivers and memory games and scrapbooks for patients. We received positive feedback from all our testers, with some organizations expressing interest in adopting DementiCare!

From left: Ritik Bhatia (CS, Year 4) and Aishik Nagar (EEE, Year 4)

Within 2 months, the results for qualifications were announced and we were thrilled when DementiCare was selected in the Global Top 50! For the next phase, we were assigned a Google mentor who guided us for 1.5 months, solidified our product roadmap and helped reach out for more organization collaborations. After another round of judging of the updated solutions, we were ecstatic when DementiCare had been shortlisted for the Global Top 10 and would be showcased on a YouTube live stream to a large audience.

The journey for DementiCare has been an amazing one so far. We are proud to have created a product that is so technologically sound and has great business potential. Above all, we are very happy that DementiCare has been recognized to have the ability to make a positive impact on a global level and that it can play an important role in social good - fighting the ill-effects of Dementia. Both Aishik and I have learnt a lot on the technical side as well as strengthened our business / sales concepts through Google’s amazing mentorship!