Ayaan
Esmail
My goal is to create something that helps a billion people live a better life.
Currently doing this by preventing & detecting falls for older adults in retirement homes!
Ayaan
My goal is to create something that helps a billion people live a better life.
Currently doing this by preventing & detecting falls for older adults in retirement homes!
Quickly going through some of the main projects I've worked on over the past few years.
We're helping retirement homes to reduce falls & fall-related injury using smart clothing that has sensors on it. We detect falls, predict when one will occur and notify staff of the location of a resident. We recently confirmed a pilot with The Responsive Group that'll start in October 🎉.This is the 2nd iteration of our product and it started with us using Samsung smartwatches for fall detection. We ran a pilot of these smartwatches with Generations Senior Living and learned alot about accuracy, operations & what we need to do to make our product sucessful, we're using these learnings to help us today!
After spending months understanding open defecation in Nigeria, 3 friends and I realized the problem with current solutions is the incentive. You can give users water, electricity, soil, etc. but the thing they care about most is money. So we figured out a way to sustainably pay families $30USD/month by turning feces into charcoal & urine into ammonium sulfate
I wanted to start something from 0 to 1 and create something I could ship out to users. A mentor of ours faced the problem of not knowing what products to take based on her pregnancy symptoms and what info to consume on diets, exercise, etc. So after speaking with lots of pregnancy experts, midwives, and OBGYNs 2 friends and I created a subscription box that we shipped to 20 users internationally with 700 pre-orders reaching $1k MRR in 2 months of working on it! Eventually, we shut it down since we realized people didn't think it was valuable, rather it was just nice to have.
After a while of working on projects related to exponential technologies, I wanted to gain some practical experience creating products that people would use. I ended up coming up with multiple ideas that never ended up panning out but here's the list: Eventbrite for teens, paying $1 to text a dog trainer for specific advice, an app that would detect the mood of your dog, an extension that would pay your friends when you went over your social media time and a platform that lets you respond to social media messages without going into that app.
I worked on an idea to prevent lung cancer before it occurs by taking in genetics (the cookbook to human life), metabolomics (an indicator of how the food you eat has affected your body), and proteomics (an indicator of how proteins in your body react with the external environment), I could run this data through a machine learning model that compares your data to patients that had the disease to predict your % chance of having it. Ended up getting chosen to do a TED Talk on the idea & also interned at University Health Network (1 of the top 5 hospital networks in the world).
Sequencing someone’s DNA takes very long to do and is done in a huge machine, a friend and I came up with an idea to sequence DNA much faster than current methods by passing DNA through a pore in a silicon nitrides heet. Electrons are tunneled between the pores in the sheet and we can tell the sequence of the DNA based on the fluctuation of current.
450 million people get pneumonia every year and 2.5 million people die from it, so ~0.6% of those that get pneumonia die. My mom was very close to being part of the 0.6% because 4 times, doctors tried and failed to prescribe her the right medication. This got me interested in pharmacogenomics: using genetics to provide the most effective medication the first time, and I ended up conducting a simulation in which I tested the correlation between specific genotypes and the effectiveness of Aspirin, Warfarin & Copidogrel (blood thinners).
Thankfully, I've been able to be apart of some amazing orginizations! Here's a quick list of them.
Before I joined TKS I wasn't exposed to much or any of the work I'm doing now, it made me realize I could actually have an impact on the world and then helped to train me on the mental models, skills, and mindsets to use when solving these problems. I'd probably be a regular kid if it wasn't for TKS.
Myant's a nanotechnology startup that's using textiles to gain information on biomarkers in the body and use that data for a variety of applications. At Myant I worked on a startup called PhageBiome in which we were leveraging biosensors and phage therapy to reinvent current therapeutics.
I interned at The Wilson Center where I worked on two main projects. The first was a research project in which we did a scoping review to define the word digital compassion, and the second was talking to key stakeholders in the hospital to look at how to implement preventative healthcare @ UHN.
Oxford Properties is a real estate investment, development, and property management company with $70 BILLION in assets under management. We pitched their team an idea that could save them tens of millions per year by taking out leasing brokers.
Right now there are about 4 million dollars for post-secondary education (PSE) that the government does not use for RESPs and other PSE fund programs! Why? Because people aren't aware of the benefits of these programs. Working with Wealthsimple, 3 friends and I created a solution to solving this problem through a referral program!
XPRIZE is a non-profit that designs and hosts public competitions that encourage people to solve huge problems. I was tasked with figuring out a way to get them more applicants for their Carbon Capture XPRIZE (which was funded by Elon).
Every month I make a quick 2 - 3 minute vid on what I've been up to! Check 'em out below.
