StrideAIde: Startup Story

StrideAIde was an offshoot of collaborative research between IISc & KIER with a team of scientists, engineers, and doctors led by Prof. Ananthasuresh from the Mechanical Engineering Department of IISc and Dr. Belehalli Pavan from the Department of Podiatry of KIER, working on solutions for the diabetic population with diabetic neuropathy and foot ulcers, seed funded by the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India through the Bengaluru Science and Technology Cluster, which is also taking steps to enable scaling up this effort. In this article, the team shares their startup story.

The startup scene in India has been seeing tremendous activity in the last few years, and, the emergence of Artificial Intelligence has only led to a faster growth in people trying to use AI in giving solutions to everyday problems.

StrideAIde was an offshoot of collaborative research between IISc and KIER. The scientists from IISc led by Prof. Ananthasuresh from the mechanical engineering department and doctors from KIER led by Dr. Belehalli Pavan from the department of Podiatry were working on giving solutions to the diabetic population with diabetic foot wounds. After their first product – “Dynamic self-offloading foot insoles” showed amazing field results, it was decided to take this collaboration a step further and include Artificial Intelligence in helping the team of doctors and scientists in delivering day-to-day solutions to people with various ankle and foot conditions.

StrideAIde was further strengthened by the joining of Dr. Sanjay Sharma and Mr. Manoj Kumar R as co-founders who have been entrepreneurs and leading some amazing inventions in their fields.

The Indian patent for the first product was obtained and strideAIde took it upon itself to bring the product into the market after further refinement. Other than this strideAIde also has been working on the “Digital Podiatry Clinic – D-PoC” which aims at making screening of diabetic feet accessible and affordable to the public and reducing the amputation rates in India.

The other future projects in the pipeline include the development of “Digital foot twin” and “Development of LLM-based clinical decision support system for Diabetic foot care”. StrideAIde has also been assisted tremendously by the Bengaluru Science and Technology Cluster which has been making sure that the necessary permissions and contacts are easily obtained.

The icing on the cake was when strideAIde was adjudged “Second best startup in the early medical devices category” in the recently held IKMC 2023 (International Knowledge Millennium conference) at Hyderabad strengthening our belief that we are in the right place and moving in the right direction.

Here's to striding in the right direction with passion and foresight; saving multiple feet from amputations and making India “Diabetic foot amputation-free”. Let’s stride on….