Diabetes is the latest issue to be of concern for people around the world. Of course, lots of research is being held to reverse diabetes at the very beginning to avoid many complications that follow. Given such a scenario, imagine having a smartpen drive size device that can be plugged into your smartphone to track your diabetes level. Well, that’s exactly what Varshita and Vimal Kumar have come up with.

The device that is easy to use and low cost and a non-invasive glucometer called Ezlyf is undergoing clinical trials and will be ready to be launched in the market in the next six to eight months. Incidentally, Ezlyf is a configurable, inexpensive and painless plug-and-play glucose monitoring system that is being developed through Varshita and Vimal’s company VivaLyf Innovations, which is incubated at the University of Hyderabad.

The company recently received heavy funding from Peyush Bansal, founder and CEO of Lenskart, and Anupam Mittal, founder, and CEO of People Group on Shark Tank India. Ezlyf has to be connected to one’s smartphone, and one has to open the app and place the finger on the screen. The app records values using infra-red spectroscopy (NIR). A beam of light interacts with glucose molecules on the finger to calculate the absorption spectrum between the molecules and the wave. These values are filtered with the help of artificial intelligence (AI), and the values are displayed on one’s smartphone within 60 seconds. One can use the device in public spaces, too, without drawing attention.

It was Varshita’s dream to come up with such a device as she suffered from Type 1 diabetes from a young age, and she knew how many times she had to prick the device for readings and how much of a hassle it was. A student of biotechnology, she met Vimal Kumar at a national hackathon, and the two formed a team.

The duo has won several awards prior to this, and they were named in AIM-NITI Aayog’s top nine prospective healthcare start-ups for 2021.