They aren’t ‘IT coolies’, India’s engineers turning into designers

They aren’t ‘IT coolies’, India’s engineers turning into designers

In May this year, Hyderabad-based Hug Innovations, a wearable and IoT platform company, was awarded a patent in the US that enables it to exclusively use a particular kind of ‘gesture control’ technology. This technology enables its smart watches to not only perform tasks like tracking fitness and answering calls, but also to alert family and friends at times of distress such as a medical emergency. It is activated when the hand is twisted back and forth a few times. The company has sold 30,000  of these watches.

Raj Neravati, founder & CEO of the venture, says they applied the concept of design thinking to create the product. “There are many occasions such as a car crash, when people are not even in a position to use both their hands. We empathised with our end-users and thought through many such scenarios while designing the watch. We have trained the algorithm to also ensure normal hand motions don’t trigger the alarm,” he says.

Design thinking is beginning to get deeply embedded in the psyche of Indian companies — in startups, and big companies. Indian IT has been derided as body shoppers and its employees as IT coolies. But the reality is, there’s a lot more creativity today in the technology industry.

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from Jobs-Economic Times