His mother, Dr. Anupriya Maharshi, had been in the vehicle with him. He lost roughly a year of school. In that year he taught himself, through online courses, what he needed: Stanford's machine learning specialisation, then OpenCV, then TensorFlow. He worked alongside the neuro-rehabilitation specialist Dr. Ashwini Kale.
The gap he had felt in his own rehabilitation is a real one. The standard clinical yardstick for arm and hand recovery, the Fugl-Meyer Assessment, dates from 1975: a therapist watches a patient perform 33 items and scores each one 0, 1 or 2. Because the scoring is observational, two different raters can disagree by enough that a shift of under about 12.9 points on the 66-point scale cannot be separated from the raters themselves. A patient improving slowly may be improving invisibly.
His first tool, FAIR Chance — Fine Motor Artificial Intelligence Assisted Rehabilitation Chance — uses nothing more than the camera already in a phone or laptop. Computer vision tracks the small finger movements that decide whether a person can hold a pen or lift food to their mouth. It is in trial with 30 patients.
The second is a wristband. It notices when a patient has quietly begun leaning on the stronger hand, and answers with a gentle vibration — a reminder, not a reprimand. Twenty patients are testing it.
The principle behind the wristband is old, though its form is not. Constraint-induced movement therapy grew out of Edward Taub's work in Alabama in the late 1970s and 1980s on what he called learned non-use: the way a patient compensates with the working limb until the weaker one falls further behind. The conventional remedy is a mitt or a sling, the good arm physically bound for hours each day. Maharshi's version replaces the restraint with a cue. Nothing is taken away. Something is only suggested.
In December, at Vigyan Bhawan in New Delhi, President Droupadi Murmu conferred the Pradhan Mantri Rashtriya Bal Puraskar on twenty children. His was in science and technology.
The city he comes from is no longer called what it was called when he was injured; Aurangabad was renamed Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar while he was still recovering. He is 17 now, and 50 people he has never met are being measured by instruments a boy designed because nobody could tell him how his own hand was doing.