The 16-year-old was among the four national winners of Samsung Solve for Tomorrow 2025, a pan-India innovation competition that empowers the youth to create tech-based solutions to solve real-world problems.

During Samsung Solve for Tomorrow 2025, Pranet showcased Paraspeak, a real-time, speaker-independent speech enhancement device that converts slurred speech (dysarthria) into clear communication using deep-learning algorithms, helping individuals communicate confidently.

Paraspeak got mentorship from Samsung experts and incubation at FITT, IIT Delhi’s incubation lab in 2025 during the programme.

At the ongoing AI Impact summit, Paraspeak won the YUVAi Global Youth Challenge, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India initiative, securing a prize of ₹15 lakh. The competition attracted more than 2,500 entries from 38 countries, highlighting strong global participation from young innovators developing solutions aligned with social and developmental priorities.

This achievement reflects the growing impact of emerging talent supported through Samsung’s innovation ecosystem. Samsung Solve for Tomorrow equips participants with mentorship, structured learning, and industry exposure, enabling them to transform ideas into practical, scalable solutions with real-world relevance.

During Samsung Solve for Tomorrow 2025, the top four winning teams — Percevia (Bengaluru), NextPlay.AI (Aurangabad), Prithvi Rakshak (Palamu) and Paraspeak (Gurugram)— received INR 1 crore in incubation grants and will continue to develop their prototypes into scalable real-world solutions with mentorship support at IIT Delhi’s FITT Labs.

The India AI Impact Summit held at New Delhi convened global policymakers, industry leaders, researchers, and innovators to showcase transformative AI solutions tackling global challenges.

They are not finished products yet, neither their prototypes nor their journeys. As part of Samsung Solve for Tomorrow, challenges have not ceased for the Top 40 innovators. These young changemakers are still building, modifying, expanding, testing, and sometimes discarding ideas altogether. What they are discovering, however, may be as relevant and important as the innovations themselves: that design thinking is not just a toolkit but a mindset that demands empathy, patience, and an openness to failure.

Over the past week, participants were on a frenetic pursuit for perfection in ideas guided by mentors, workshops, and their first exposure to the FITT labs.

In an AI-driven world where speed and automation dominate the public discourse, these students are being reminded that the true test of technology is whether it can connect to the human heart and the human behaviour.

Sitting With the Problem

In this context, it will be pertinent to speak about the story of the Pink Brigadiers. A team comprising of Vivek Sawant from Maharashtra and Shriya Aditya Dalai from Odisha, both NIT Rourkela engineering students. What are they doing this year? They are working on what they call Bharat’s first AI-driven breast care app. At first glance, it’s a technical marvel: convolutional neural networks with edge deployment that can detect anomalies and connect women with doctors. But the breakthrough, they admit, has not been in the code.

“Our product requires immense sensitivity. The design thinking training encouraged us to sit with the problem longer, understand users more deeply, and keep adapting to their needs. UX/UI and trust are as important as the AI itself,” they explain.

For them, design thinking is a reminder that how an app makes someone feel may be as critical as what it does. Building technology for a deeply private health concern means that tone, colour palettes, language, and interface all become questions of empathy. This insight resonates with recent Stanford research showing that building fair and trustworthy AI systems requires attention not only to algorithms but also to transparency, edge-case behaviour, and user comfort.

Humanising AI

Elsewhere, inside the FITT lab there is a duo trying to grasp the lesson on AI from their product – How can AI provide intelligence, and how can design thinking make it intelligible.

Take Mindsnap, a personalised education platform created by Devayanee Gupta and Sayan Adhikary from Kolkata, both engineering students. Powered by large language models (LLMs), the platform adapts to neurodiverse learners, whether they are dyslexic, on the spectrum, or simply learn better through games.

“We realised no algorithm works if the interface doesn’t speak to the learner,” they explain. “Design thinking made us focus on UX/UI, accessibility, and the lived experience of students.”

Aditya Verma from Chennai is making a similar discovery with Mama Saheli AI, a holistic pregnancy app inspired by his mother’s experience in remote areas where medical access was limited.

“My app had to feel like a friend, not just a tool. Design thinking pushed me to see it through the user’s emotions, behaviour, and even cultural context. That’s what makes it scalable and trustworthy,” he says.

His app synthesises information, filters out misinformation, and integrates with wearables to provide hyperpersonalized insights, but its soul lies in the idea of companionship. His approach aligns with the PADTHAI-MM framework, which shows that transparent, human-centred design, combining explainability with user context, produces far more trust than opaque “black box” AI.

Design as a Strategy for Scale

The Prithvirakshak team from Ludhiana: 12th graders Abhishek Dhanda, Prabhkirat Singh, and Rachita Chandok are fighting India’s colossal waste management problem with what they call the nation’s first modular automated vermicomposting centre.

The idea began as a classroom experiment, it has now become a three-year journey of prototyping, testing, and learning how to collapse a 90-day composting process into just 30 days.

“Traditionally, vermicomposting has been labour-intensive and hard to scale,” they explain. “Design thinking helped us imagine modular models that can work in a garden, a housing society, or even at city level.”

For them, scalability is not about size but about adaptability, the ability to shape the same core idea to serve farmers, urban families, or municipalities.

The Journey, Not the Destination

None of these teams know if they will eventually win the Solve for Tomorrow challenge. Their prototypes remain imperfect; their pitch decks are still being rewritten. Yet what binds them together is a recognition that design thinking has already amended their approach.

While global conversations around AI often spiral into questions of ethics, bias, and speed, these young problem-solvers are grounding their innovations in something older and steadier: human-centred design.

AI, they are discovering, may be the brain. But design thinking, in all its humility and discipline, is the heart. And as these students continue to fight for their place in the Top 20, that may turn out to be the most important lesson of all.

Over the last weekend, 10 young Samsung employees from various parts of the organisation had a unique job assigned to them. They were the jury for the Solve for Tomorrow education and innovation competition in India, tasked with judging the teams that have reached the top 50 in the competition.

Between September 15 and 17, the jury and 118 bright young minds from across 18 states and 1 union territory of India were gathered at the prestigious IIT Delhi campus for a three-day bootcamp where the Solve for Tomorrow participants were groomed on designing thinking and how to pitch their ideas to a jury.

The chosen 50 teams, with youth aged between 16-22, were here for the next phase of ‘Solve for Tomorrow’, where they further developed their ideas to solve the world’s most pressing issues. With the support and expertise of Samsung’s knowledge partner FITT, IIT Delhi, the 50 teams were mentored by trainers from IIT Delhi to help them enhance their ideas.

The three-day weren’t all work with no play. The ‘Solvers’ met each other only to find out how brilliant each of their ideas were. They embraced different cultures, languages and food as it was a house full of diversity with teams from across India.

At the end of the bootcamp, the young jury finally got down to tallying the scores for each team and picked the Top 10 teams that came up with the best ideas in the areas of environmental conservation, making healthcare more accessible to the less privileged, menstrual hygiene for rural women and stress management, among others.

Let us show you a few glimpses of the thought-provoking three-days, and introduce you to our exciting, and excited jury members

2020 marks the first year that the start-ups accepted to participate in C-Lab outside will be featured at CES. Leveraging the success of the C-Lab Inside initiative, C-Lab Outside has been expanding Samsung’s support for new ventures to start ups and innovations outside of the Samsung network since 2018. The program provides financial support, business collaboration and chances to participate in global exhibitions for new entities with the goal of energizing the start-up ecosystem and creating more IT and technology-driven jobs.

The number of homes populated by just one person is expected to skyrocket in the near-future, with more than 120 million new single-person households expected to be added globally between 2016 and 2030. This demographic will be created by young singles prioritizing their careers over relationships, as well as by the expanding widowed and divorced elderly group, which is especially significant in developed countries. From these shifting demographics emerge pressing concerns regarding loneliness, isolation and a host of other social problems. Thus, team Circulus has introduced its household pet robot ‘pibo’ to try and help address this issue. Asked about the meaning of their team name, team Circulus related that “Circulus is Latin for circle. The word also contains “us”, which stands for “let us help each other.”

Pibo balances people’s emotions via communication. It is versatile, offering basic conversation, guidance services including news and weather information, and a voice search function. The humanoid robot analyzes the user’s facial expressions and dialogue in order to best interact with them, delivering conversation, well-known sayings, turning on music or starting to dance depending on how the user is perceived to be feeling. Unlike a smart speaker, pibo doesn’t wait for you to speak up first, and will often initiate conversation when you walk past. Users can also share memories with pibo, using it to share memories, photos and voice diary entries. What’s more, users can update their pet robot with new features by downloading them from the robot application store. pibo can be customized specifically for you as you make use of its advanced capabilities and tailor its functions to your preferences.

“We’d like to introduce pibo to the world at CES 2020,” said a member of Circulus, “As the US, Europe and Japan are all experiencing an uptick in one-person households, pibo can be a great friend to those who are alone.”

Generally, if you want a personalized exercise plan, you must first undergo a medical examination. However, going to the hospital to put on a mask and run on a treadmill represents a daunting task to many. FITT is a PHR (Personal Health Record) healthcare data platform that was created to positively influence people’s health via easy-to-use exercise evaluation software. When asked about the meaning of their team name, team FITT explained that “Our team name is an abbreviation of the four major elements of exercise planning: Frequency, Intensity, Time and Type.”

FITT starts out by measuring your maximum oxygen intake while you complete a 2.4km running exercise through the FITT app. This test allows the program to produce four one-page reports containing professional-level data regarding the user’s body and physical condition, as well as a fitness program that is tailor-made for them. Within the program FITT issues a customized cardiorespiratory exercise plan, recommending how far users should run, how fast and for how long, as well as a customized posture and muscle strength exercise plan. Once users complete the fitness test, FITT can even predict diseases that the user might be susceptible to, including high blood pressure, diabetes, cancer, stroke, heart attacks and cardiovascular disease, among others. If the system identifies that a user is at risk for one or more of these conditions, it will recommend further preventative activities for them. FITT is currently being provided as a web service in select fitness centers, but will be made widely available once the FITT app launches in March of 2020.

“Exercise works best when it is customized for the individual and done in a controlled environment,” a member of team FITT commented, “I hope our ‘exercise evaluations’ help users find out which kind of exercise routine is the best fit for them.”

These days, people use a lot of different devices, with a broad range of different features. In light of this, Suk-jung Kim of Vtouch says he feels that “new ways to interact with devices should be emerging as well.” The conventional input methods these days include either using a touchscreen or interacting with a cursor, but these methods can be prohibitive for users with limited mobility or children who cannot always reach up high enough to interact with devices. Asked about the meaning of their team name, team Vtouch reported that “It means ‘virtual touch’, which communicates the fact that our solution can bring about a ‘touch’ input without the need for physical contact.”

Vtouch’s concept focuses on the fact that whenever you point at an object, your eyes, finger and the object you are pointing at are aligned. The technology enables a non-contact touch input by using computer vision and deep-learning technologies to analyze the movement of the eyes and finger through a camera. Vtouch allows for more sanitary use of devices by removing the physical touch element, and allows for precise, next-generation gesture controls with an error margin of just 5 degrees. As the intuitive technology only requires a camera and processor to work, it can be implemented in a wide range of sectors including automotive, IoT (smart home) and digital signage.

“At first, Vtouch was too expensive to mass produce,” a member of the Vtouch team relates, “However, with the help of various researchers and developers we have been able to bring the price down to where it is now cheaper than most touch panels. We are hoping to implement our solution in multiple environments soon in order to provide a convenient, inclusive experience for users.”

We are living in the era of video-first, and video calls are great for allowing you to talk to loved ones face-to-face without actually being in the same place. However, video calls aren’t appropriate for all situations. If someone video calls you in a quiet place like the library or the subway, or if you want to talk about something private, video calls are less than ideal. Thus, the Smoothy team set out to create a video call app that would address these inconveniences. By incorporating text elements into the video calling interface, while also allowing people to incorporate large groups into their video calls, Smoothy has attracted more than 850,000 users already. Commenting on their team name, the members of team Smoothy related that “Our name implies the smooth combination of video, voice and text during video calls. It also means togetherness while expressing yourself, wherever you are.”

When you answer a call on Smoothy, the call is initially launched in silent mode, meaning that you can answer a video call, anytime, anywhere. Smoothy allows for large group video calls as well, enabling up to eight people to participate in a video call at once. From there, you can either talk normally, or chat with real-time texting, with your texts appearing in the call window as you type. Although we are living in the world of video, most people still communicate through text messages, and the world of texting is brought to life when you can see your friend’s reaction in real-time right before your eyes. Smoothy even allows you to quickly and conveniently capture video clips and send them to friends, enabling whole conversations to unfold through snippets of video. Unlike other video call apps, Smoothy enables you to decorate yourself with features such as AR Emoji, allowing for more fun video chats. When you are in a video chat with more than two people, Smoothy even allows you to visualize your reactions with next-level features such as a lightning effect and a function that allows you to cause other participants’ displays to shake.

“Firstly, we would like to provide a video call app that is fun to use,” reported a member of team Smoothy, “And secondly, we want to deliver an app that enables a wide range of effects and interaction styles.”