Two teenage girls are changing the lives of Parkinson’s patients with their new invention. High schoolers Kaavya Karthikeyan and Akanksha Tibrewala are childhood best friends, neighbors and classmates in Fairfax County, Virginia. Their biggest shared passion is caring for seniors, especially those with Parkinson’s disease, which is how they first sparked the idea for a walker.
“Once we had this idea, we were really surprised to see there was nothing on the market like this,” Karthikeyan said. “We asked multiple Parkinson’s patients, as well as physicians, if our product really made sense or if it would help in the field, and it actually gave us really good results and we got good feedback from them.”
Tibrewala was inspired to create a walker when thinking about her great-grandmother, who is paralyzed on one side of her body and has difficulty walking. Since then, the friends have spent the last two years designing an automatic walker and testing it on patients in local facilities. Their next goal is to get a patent and get their invention on the market.
