On 25 September, inside the UN Conference Centre in Bangkok, the youngest speaker in the room walked up holding a cane.
Aaradhya Jain was there as a youth speaker at the Second World Summit on Sustainable Health and Well-Being. The cane in her hand was STAMBHA (स्तम्भ, “the pillar”), which she designed, wired and programmed herself. After her talk, she found herself explaining it to a WHO regional adviser and to Hungary’s Ambassador to Thailand.
It was a long way from where the idea began: her own living room in Noida.
Why an 11-year-old built a cane
STAMBHA started with a question most adults never think to ask.
“When I was small, someone was always checking on me,” Aaradhya says. “Then they got old, and no one was checking on them.”
She means her grandparents. They used to fuss over whether she was warm, whether she was safe. As they aged, she noticed the roles never reversed. Her conclusion is disarmingly simple: a life should be held all the way through, not just at the beginning.
A second spark came from the screen. Watching Srikanth, the biopic of visually impaired industrialist Srikanth Bolla, made her wonder what moving through the world without sight actually feels like.
So she tried it. She shut her eyes and walked around the house. “Naturally, I was banging everywhere,” she told Digit. That bruising experiment became her first piece of user research.
A guide to the world, and a guardian for the person holding it
Most smart canes look only outward, at the ground ahead. STAMBHA also looks inward, at the person gripping it. In the world of assistive tech, that usually means three separate products. Aaradhya put them in one stick.
Facing outward. A laser rangefinder spots obstacles ahead and warns the user with a buzz in the palm. A camera describes the scene and reads signs aloud.
Facing inward. Sensors in the grip track pulse, blood oxygen and balance. The cane also knows whether a hand is still holding on.
Just talk to it. Users speak to STAMBHA in Hindi or English. “What does this sign say?” “Where is the nearest chemist?” “Is my walk steady today?” It answers using both the world around the user and the user’s own past readings.
When something goes wrong, it alerts family with the user’s location. Crucially, it can tell a stumble from a fall, so a minor trip doesn’t set off a panic. False alarms are a big reason people abandon such gadgets. It also works without a phone, so a dead smartphone battery doesn’t leave the user unprotected.
Aaradhya is careful to say STAMBHA is not a medical device and makes no diagnostic claims. It is a working prototype built to notice change.
Built at home, tested on family
STAMBHA runs on an ESP32-S3 microcontroller. Aaradhya worked on it for about a year, with her father and her uncle Nitin Jain, CTO of ShareChat, often beside her. The trickiest soldering she watched rather than did, and she says so herself.
Much of the code was written with AI programming tools, which Nitin estimates handled about 80% of it. “If you have the concept, if you have the idea, you can do it,” he told Digit.
But the AI didn’t decide what the cane should notice, or when it should stay quiet. Aaradhya did. Early builds kept failing as sensors malfunctioned wherever she mounted them. She kept moving them until they worked.
Her test users were the people closest to her: parents, grandparents and her elder sister. Between 25 August and 23 September she ran 16 test sessions. They produced more than 22,600 sensor records, over 8,500 obstacle records and nearly 20,000 balance records. That is closer to a small field trial than a school project.
The effort has already been recognised. Aaradhya was named a Global Child Prodigy Award winner and one of the Top 100 Child Prodigies of the World 2025, at a ceremony held at the UK House of Commons.
Why India needs a cane like this
India is ageing fast. About 149 million Indians are over 60 today, a number expected to reach about 347 million by 2050, according to the UNFPA India Ageing Report 2023. Many of them live alone or with children who work long hours far away.
The tools that could help them are out of reach. Comparable smart canes sold abroad cost ₹80,000 or more. STAMBHA’s parts come to about ₹10,000, roughly an eighth of the price.
That gap is the real story. A cane that talks in Hindi, reads a pharmacy sign and calls home after a fall could matter most to people who will never shop for imported assistive tech.
What’s next for STAMBHA
On 17–18 October, Aaradhya presents STAMBHA again, this time on Innovation World’s global GIFT livestream.
After that comes the harder test. She plans to put the cane in the hands of real elderly and visually impaired users, then redesign it around what they tell her.
Ask her what success looks like and she doesn’t mention funding, scale or a startup. “My goal is to make it reach the right people,” she says. “I built this for the right people.”
She named it “the pillar” for a reason. At 11, Aaradhya Jain is building something for the people who once held her up, so they never have to walk alone.