Rohan Suri demonstrates his cardboard concussion detector.
Last summer Rohan Suri, a 17-year-old from Virginia, watched his younger brother experience the consequences of a concussion. His brother had been playing football but it took days for anyone to realize that the blow had done so much damage.
He couldn’t go to school or do homework. His grades suffered, Suri said. “I saw first hand what that did,” Suri said.
So the teenager (then still 16) decided he wanted to create something that would help diagnose concussions. The idea turned into a startup Averia whose centerpiece is a device that combines an iPhone, an app and a cardboard headset. It costs a small fraction of other technologies and it can be used where athletes are playing.
“We’re very lean,” Suri said, speaking in the measured cadence of a veteran entrepreneur.
On Saturday he will be taking the device to a competition organized by Children’s National Health System in Washington, D.C. There, he will compete against a dozen other entrepreneurs. Suri will be the youngest competitor in the four years since the event began.
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Six contestants will be chosen. The winners receive $50,000 each.
“I’m ready for it,” said Suri.
His co-founder Samuel Damashek is also aged 17 but won’t be able to join him.
It’s classic Silicon Valley. A prodigy duo adapts a technology, lowers the cost and makes rapid iteration feasible. But instead of selfies or disappearing messages, the point is to make something that fills a gap of innovative devices for children’s healthcare. The device has already made it past more than 90 applications from around the world.
Bringing devices to market requires millions of dollars, said Kolaleh Eskandanian, the executive director of the Sheikh Zayed Institute for Pediatric Surgical Innovation at Children’s National Health System, who in charge of program behind Saturday’s annual event. The competition opens up much-needed funding, Eskandanian said in an email. The relationship doesn’t stop with the competition, she said.
“We are committed to building on this momentum and keeping the conversation going,” Eskandanian said.
Most teenagers would be intimated by the thought of public speaking, let alone being judged by seasoned venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, innovators and intellectual property attorneys. Yet, despite his age, the scenario is second nature to Suri, who grew up in Alexandria, Virginia. His high school, the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, is devoted to a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship. Which helps explain why Suri would be perfectly willing to add to the stress of college applications and grades by developing apps, drafting business plans and writing grant proposals. When asked about dating he responded by talking about efficiency.
“My time is a very valuable resource,” Suri said, adding that there is a “big opportunity cost in terms of what I am willing to do.”
In other words, he’s really very busy.
Suri said he began coding in 7th grade (C, Java and Python) and developed his first app two years later when he still had to take the bus to school. He was supposed to text his mother when the bus was near the stop so she could pick him up. Easier said than done for a ninth grader. Sometimes Suri fell asleep or got distracted. The solution was to build an app that automatically texted Suri’s mother when he was near the bus stop. He called it “Almost There.”
He went on to develop an app to translate American sign language into spoken words. He said his “previous venture” was a device that tracked infectious disease that took two years to develop. Suri’s waiting to find out whether he made the cut for a grant from USAID, the economic, development and humanitarian assistance agency.
One of his inspirations is Tesla co-founder Elon Musk. Another inspiration is his father, a software engineer and serial entrepreneur, who provided the spark that led to Averia.
Head injuries are diagnosed by doctors, who test for memory, coordination and the ability to recall information. They may also send patients for CT scans or MRIs, but without insurance the scans are too expensive and they aren’t stationed where the accidents happen.
The reality is that concussions are hard to detect. The impact is enough to rattle the brain but usually doesn’t knock anyone out. So symptoms might not show up for hours. Hints that the brain has been so traumatized can easily be mistaken for something else or, like Suri’s brother, dismissed until symptoms worsen.
As a team of researchers at the Waukesha Memorial Hospital Neuroscience Center put it, “diagnosis of sports-related concussion is perhaps the most elusive challenge facing sports medicine clinicians.” Left undetected and untreated, the consequences according to the Waukesha researchers can be “catastrophic.”
Suri had learned about an alternative tool that uses eye-tracking technology but he ruled it out as too expensive. It was not as expensive as an MRI or CT scan but did cost too much for schools and sports teams, the ones who needed a way to survey players on the field. Indeed, his sister had twice suffered a concussion while playing soccer.
Then Suri’s father came home with an iPhone 6. “That’s when it hit me,” Suri said. He could use the smartphone’s camera for the display, the most expensive part of the existing eye-tracking devices. He enlisted the help of Damashek (“Samuel’s a really brilliant guy,” Suri said). The two took the idea for Averia to the MLH Prime hackathon during the summer of 2016. Their proof of concept won first place. They showed that the technology could be brought onto an iPhone.
On Saturday Suri will try to convince the judges that Averia is ready for the next step. In the meantime, Suri said he’s practicing the pitch with a group of investors and physicians that he has assembled over the past two years that he calls his advisory board. And he’s making plans to expand. They want to have the device in 11 high schools soon and start making sales by the fourth quarter of 2017.
