Innovator’s Smart Wheelchair Wins Shark Tank Funding

Sruthi Babu, a biomedical instrumentation engineer, has developed a smart wheelchair called Sahayatha with an assistive cleaning device that offers convenience and dignity to immobile patients. This innovation aims to bring a semblance of dignity to those who are immobile and struggle to move or clean themselves after defecation or urination. The idea arose when Babu visited the Ganga Hospital in Coimbatore as part of an immersion program and witnessed the struggle of a patient’s caretakers, who were his two daughters, to take him to the bathroom and clean him. Babu’s innovation was recently featured on Shark Tank India Season 2, where she won Rs 1 crore in funding from five sharks.

Sahayatha is a wheelchair with an assistive cleansing system that can clean an immobile person after defecation or urination. The product comes in two options, the S100 and S200, with the former being attendant-propelled or self-propelled and can be reclined to an angle of 180 degrees. The latter is a non-recliner product. With one easy press of a switch, a jet spray cleans the patient, and there is also a bidet that can be removed from the rear end for easy disposal.

Babu comes from a family of entrepreneurs, and her father supported her idea. They named their product Sahayatha, which means support, under the company Dhanvantri Biomedical Pvt Ltd. It took 118 iterations and five prototypes to zero in on the final design. The company launched the final design on May 8, 2022.

Babu and her father initially invested Rs 18 lakh in Sahayatha, and she received grants from BIRAC, the Department of Science and Technology, and the Tamil Nadu Student Innovators Programme. She is also supported by Startup TN, Startup India, and KIIT-TBI, Technology Business Incubator. So far, she has sold around 28 wheelchairs. Babu hopes that the combined expertise of all the sharks will take Sahayatha forward, and when volumes increase, they can also bring its price down.

Staff Reporter