Few interesting innovations of 2021

Innovation typically can be categorized into two purposes - to improve our quality of life, or to boost up our ego (or both)! For instance, some pricey electronics bring high-tech luxury to home decor or polish up our lifestyle to that of a millionaire. But the more practical gadgets will improve health and wellness, or augment gaming experiences, for example, while still keeping things “cool”. Are 2021’s innovations all in regular gadgets like smartphones? Not really. There has been quite a few interesting innovations - an emotional support robot for hospitalized children, an environmentally friendly dye for jeans and even a brand new pasta shape, not to mention the absolute life-saving vaccines for Covid and Malaria. Here are a few innovations from 2021 that I found interesting.

Reading can be a serious challenge for tens of millions of people, whether they struggle with comprehension difficulties, poor vision, dyslexia or other issues. But using computer vision and AI, the OrCam Read can read any piece of text aloud. We can target the device’s laser frame at a page of a book, a menu, an advertisement or a screen displaying text, press a button, and the device instantly vocalizes it, in a voice that sounds remarkably natural; it also can read text in multiple languages. And since the device is able to respond to voice commands, we can ask it to read, say, a phone number from an ad, the operating hours of a business or even our favorite stories!

A text from our spouse (for whatever purposes!) is a lot more important than say a college friend sending a funny video. But while we can designate different tones for different callers, our phone otherwise treats all messages the same. BuzzBell changes that. It's a messaging platform that lets us give approved senders the ability to assign different levels of urgency sounds to messages. Would that be welcome? I don't know, but that's for us to figure out how best to use this cool innovation!

When we sit down at our desk sometime in the near future, instead of turning on a monitor or opening our laptop, we may simply don a pair of Lenovo’s ThinkReality A3 Smart Glasses. We will connect the glasses to a computer or smartphone, and high-definition displays built into the lenses will show us as many as 5 different virtual desktops. As we move our head to view the different desktops floating in front of us, we can continue multitasking between Excel spreadsheets or Word documents or MS Outlook mails, as we normally would using a standard keyboard, track pad or mouse, all while streaming a Spotify playlist through the headset’s built-in speakers!

Language-as-a-Service (LaaS)! KUDO Marketplace is a platform that provides 24x7 access to thousands of KUDO Pro certified interpreters with real-time availability checks and instant booking confirmations. What was once a manual and time-consuming process, requiring multiple calls, scheduling, emailing, contract negotiating, and invoice tracking, KUDO has made it automatic and time-saving. The platform will facilitate scheduling online multilingual meetings by reducing the number of touch points within the planning process. It automatically matches seasoned interpreters to meetings based on their language specificity, availability and skillset, in real-time. So, meetings amongst people speaking different languages can be seamless and planned in real-time with this LaaS platform.

Enough of cool glasses and marketplaces. How about something for the Farmers in the real world? Israeli agriculture startup SupPlant has developed autonomous irrigation based on IoT. An AI-enabled sensor placed in soil and on plants informs Farmers exactly when and how much to water based on an algorithm that calculates plant needs, soil moisture, climate conditions. It thus offers low-cost irrigation solutions without the necessity of larger capital investments in hardware on the ground, allowing small growers to benefit from an adaptable irrigation strategy. With this SupPlant aims to address the impact of global warming worldwide on smallholder farmers.

The best is saved for the last. A Class IX student from Sitapur, UP, has developed a cost-effective automotive prototype that could save the lives of many infants who are left to suffocate in the car and for this, she bagged the first prize in the India@75 National Youth Ideathon 2021. Every year hundreds of infants die across the world after their parents leave them in the car, thinking it’s going to be for some time. The kids die due to a rise in levels of CO2 in a closed car, with windows rolled up. Dakshyani Pandey has developed a prototype using a MQ 135 sensor (a sensor highly sensitive to CO2 levels) that was hooked to a microcontroller and a servo motor for allowing the window to operate. The prototype detects CO2 levels inside a car and the moment it reaches dangerous levels, it automatically pops open the window just a little bit, to allow fresh air to flow in the car. This just shows the best innovations can often come from the unlikeliest of places and that is how humans will always strive to make this planet better!