At 14, Building for the Blind, At 20, Detecting Silicosis, Samsung Solve For Tomorrow Finds New Voices

This year’s Samsung Solve for Tomorrow brings young innovators from the rural heartlands of India, proving that ideas born anywhere can change lives everywhere

At just 14, a young innovator built a device to help the blind communicate, another participant used artificial intelligence to aid in early breast cancer detection. These stories are what is driving the essence of Solve for Tomorrow (SFT), Samsung’s flagship CSR innovation and education initiative that empowers India’s youth to solve real-world problems with technology and design thinking.

Now in its 2025 edition, Solve for Tomorrow is reaching farther and deeper than ever before, with entries from Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities and rural communities across India. From Bokaro in Jharkhand to the small towns of Andhra Pradesh, the program has searched for bold, practical solutions that reflect the ingenuity of India’s young problem-solvers.

On a Monday morning at IIT Delhi, the Research and Innovation Park is alive with the kind of energy that only comes when young people believe they can change the world. Students in Solve for Tomorrow T-shirts rush between buildings, laptops in hand, faces set with silent determination of competitors on a deadline. Some are in their final year of engineering; others are barely into high school. All are part of the Top 40 contestants of Solve for Tomorrow 2025.

For three days, the top 40 immersed themselves in design thinking workshops led by IIT Delhi professors and startup founders. This was no lecture series, it was a bootcamp. Students were pushed to sit longer with problems, mould their ideas through user empathy, and test prototypes. For the first time, participants also had access to FITT labs, giving them space and resources to prototype solutions that once lived only in imagination. And in another first, alumni from earlier SFT cohorts returned as mentors, creating a cycle of peer learning and inspiration.

A Glasses Case for Dignity

Among this year’s standouts is Paras Tickoo, a 14-year-old student from Delhi who has developed AI-powered smart glasses for the deaf and mute communities. The device converts Indian Sign Language into spoken words using AI and speech-to-text modules, bridging one of accessibility’s most enduring gaps. This device comprises of a speaker and a display facility for better interpretation.

Paras’s inspiration came early. “As a child, I had a neighbour who was deaf and blind and depended on their parents for everything,” he said. “That experience has always stayed with me.” At the workshops, Paras encountered design thinking for the first time. “It taught me that innovation must have meaning, context, and empathy. Even my pitch deck looks different now, it has clarity and direction from what it was before.”

Mining Towns, Silent Crises

Hundreds of kilometers away from the national capital, in Andhra Pradesh’s Nandyal district, engineering student Shaik Khaja Baba has been working on a solution to one of the region’s most devastating public health crises: silicosis. A fatal lung disease caused by prolonged exposure to silica dust, silicosis claims the lives of mine workers often before diagnosis is even made.

Baba’s project, Alchemist, is a hardware-software device that analyzes a patient’s breath for volatile organic compounds linked to silica exposure. A three-layer machine learning model then generates a personalized risk assessment.

“In my town, I live next to a hospital,” he said. “I’ve seen mine workers lose their lives to silicosis because it was detected too late. I wanted to change that.”

Before joining Solve for Tomorrow, Baba had never heard of design thinking. “College never offered this kind of exposure. Now I know it’s not enough to feel urgency about a problem, you need to live with it, listen to users, and design solutions that fit their lives. This made me think harder about how to make my device more compact. The FITT labs that we have access to has given us the resources and the space that is required for my product.”

Breathing With Dignity

From Jharkhand’s Bokaro comes Aprajita, a fourth-year design student at NID Kurukshetra. Her project, EaseAir, is a hardware device that makes it easier for asthma patients, senior citizens, and people with motor-skill challenges to use inhalers. Conventional devices demand a precise two-finger-and-thumb grip, EaseAir offers an ergonomic design that accommodates different hand strengths and positions.

The idea was born from watching her grandmother struggle. “I realised dignity is an important part of life, especially for the elderly and the differently abled,” she said. “Through EaseAir, I want to make design inclusive.”

Aprajita’s project has also evolved into a potential software extension, an app that tracks respiratory health and connects patients with doctors. For someone without an engineering background, SFT has been transformative. “The workshops taught me how to communicate my vision and understand users better. Alumni mentorship reminded me that empathy and iteration are at the core of design.”

More Than a Contest

At its heart, Solve for Tomorrow is more than a competition, it is about education and innovation that is supporting India’s ambition to scale the next phase of Digital India, democratizing access to emerging technologies. It is a platform for reimagining India’s future where teenagers build medical devices, design students prototype inclusive hardware, and engineering undergraduates tackle health taboos. The program is bigger this year not just because of its scale, but because of its reach: into classrooms, labs, small towns, and personal histories.

As the deadline for pitch submissions looms, the campus buzzes with ideas that may or may not win but will certainly outlive the contest. For India’s young innovators, SFT is not the finish line. It’s the beginning.