At an early age, 12-year-old Aryan Debnath from Gurgaon became accustomed to the silence around him as he struggled with delayed speech and Autistic Spectrum Disorder, which made communication difficult. His interest in coding led him to develop an app to help other autistic children like himself.
Aryan’s mother, Anamika Sengupta, spoke on his behalf to Education Times, explaining that regular educators often treat all autistic children the same and equate autism with intellectual disability. However, last year, Aryan’s mother found a one-on-one class option offered by Whitehat Jr., where Aryan finally had a teacher who accommodated his needs and pace. Through this program, Aryan was able to communicate his ideas, despite difficulties in verbal communication.
Aryan began working on the coding platform and expressed to his mentors the need to develop applications for people with various disabilities. In an internal competition, Aryan’s idea for developing an optic-friendly application to assist patients with autism earned him fourth prize. Drawing from his own experiences, Aryan identified the major issues that children with autism face, particularly in communication and social skills. Thus, he developed the “Companion” app, which includes a calendar to help children and caregivers understand daily schedules, emotional cues for expressing feelings, a visual library of pictures for communication needs, an in-danger feature for alerting others in times of insecurity, and a tracking feature for parents.
Aryan’s future plans for the app include incorporating a camera to record potentially difficult situations in public spaces. He hopes to release an improved version of the app soon, which will be available on the iOS App Store.
