Who is Roopam Sharma , and why do people compare him to Steve jobs and elon musk?

Who is Roopam Sharma ?

He is 21 years old.

He is, as he describes, from a humble middle class Indian family.

He was born and educated in Faridabad, Haryana.

He joined a Bachelors degree in Engineering at Manav Rachna University in Faridabad.

As Wikipedia rightly describes, this 21 year genius started his innovations and research during his undergraduate years . From what is evident from his profile, Manav Rachna Research Innovation and Incubation Centre or MRIIC gave him a huge impetus.

Why are people comparing him to Steve Jobs and Elon Musk ?

Elon Musk was born in 1971 and his first company, Zip2 was founded in 1995. His biggest success SpaceX and Tesla were started in 2002 and 2003 respectively. On the other hand, Steve Jobs born in 1955, co-founded Apple when Steve Wozniak came up to him with a rudimentary model of Apple-I in 1978. That makes Elon Musk 24 years old and Steve Jobs 23 years old at the time of their first innovations.

However, Roopam Sharma born in 1995 came up with ManoVue, one of his finest innovations, at the mere age of 20 years. The project went ahead to make him famous a year or two later.

MANOVUE

Mano means hand in Spanish and Vue means sight in French. ManoVue as Roopam Sharma describes is a device that enables transcendent vision for blind people.

The idea began with Roopam wanting to device a game for color blind people. While researching for the game he discovered that there had not been much that had been done since the inception of Braille script to increase literacy among the blind. His team went ahead to conduct an extensive survey on blind people to finally realize that they faced three major hurdles in general- the inability to read any text that is not in Braille, navigation through their surroundings and accessibility to smartphones.

Sharma, as part of his work at the Manav Rachna Incubation and Innovation Centre, decided to address these three problems by creating Manovue, a device that the user wears like a glove. The device has a camera that reads the text and converts it into audio. The glove is attached to a mobile app that guides the visually impaired in navigation by linking it with Maps. It vibrates to alert them of obstacles in the way. The app also enables the user to send text messages, make calls and alert their contacts in case of an emergency.

ManoVue is in its final stage of testing and Sharma is lobbying to make it reasonably priced so that even the low income group will be able to access it. The official website is also offering ManoVue on rent.

After Louis Braille, I see Roopam Sharma creating something that can go in increasing the quality of life and productivity of visually impaired individuals signifcantly.

You can find out more about the product on MANOVUE

FIZIO

Fizio is Roopam Sharma’s second innovation. This is not as popular as ManoVue but I personally believe this product holds a spectacular promise to the healthcare industry- especially physiotherapists.

Fizio is a virtual rehabilitation platform designed to aid the rehabilitation process and track progress for patients requiring physiotherapy. It transforms exercises into video-games, and uses Microsoft’s Kinect sensor to track and assess the patient’s compliance. The key features of Fizio are-

• Full Body Motion Sensors that help animate the in-game avatar of a person using real time motion capture data.
• Allows patients receiving physiotherapy to track their progress and connect with each other.
• A dedicated dashboard for each patient where the doctor can give feedback on the their performance.

Currently Fizio has managed to get a partnership with the Indian Red Cross Society which can make it a general physiotherapy tool very soon.

( Source: A Virtual Rehabilitation Platform )

Despite such spectacular innovations, Roopam Sharma has been recognized worldwide only in the past three years. His biggest recognition came when ManoVue made it into the final rounds of Microsoft Imagine World Cup Championship 2015- a competition that brings the best of innovators from every corner of the world. He was also awarded the Gifted Citizen Prize for 2016.

These innovations and visionary thinking is what makes Roopam Sharma comparable to Elon Musk, Steve Jobs and their likes.

Edit: Just in case you were wondering how he looks, here is a picture of Roopam Sharma that I found on the internet-