Hot or Cold, Nexleaf is There

“Wood or cow dung cakes under mud stoves in their homes” – that is how Vijay Mahajan says the world’s poorest 3 billion still cook, in his book Digital Leapfrogs. Even though the benefits of switching to cleaner stoves is evident – both to the individuals and the environment – nothing much has changed in the last 30 years. Why not? The reasons include inertia, newer stoves not being designed for how poor women actually cook, limited financing options, and no repair or maintenance services.

 

In India, one recent attempt at addressing this problem is by Nexleaf. In addition to means like providing loans, it uses digital technology to attack the problem. The company calls it StoveTrace. A sensor is attached to the stove that registers (1) when the stove is in use, and (2) temperature of the fire. This sensor connects to a device on the wall that records the data and sends it onwards to Nexleaf via good old phone lines.

 

Nexleaf uses this data to identify whether a stove needs repair, and sends a technician proactively (Women in rural areas don’t exactly call service centers). Or the company waits for enough issues to accumulate in a village or area to make the trip by the technician economically viable.

 

Also, thanks to this digital tech, Nexleaf can monitor how much the stove is being used. Thus, based on actual usage, it gives money back as “climate credit”. (The cofounder and CEO, Nithya Ramanathan, cares for the environment, hence this measure).

 

~~~

 

The opposite of hot is cold. And Nexleaf uses its ColdTrace tech on the other end of the temperature spectrum. For monitoring the temperature at which vaccines are stored. In a country with problematics transportation networks, faulty refrigerators, and unstable electricity, this is very helpful. If the temperature deviates from the acceptable band, the first alert is sent to the nurse, the next one to higher authorities.

 

As the price of all Internet of Things (IoT) things kept falling and data analytics became easier, Nexleaf went further:

“ColdTrace provides health officials with an online dashboard that collects and aggregates data on refrigerator performance, power outages, temperature averages and changes over time.”

This helps health official get the big picture, spot trends, identify areas that are lagging, and also areas that are doing better, which can then be checked for best practices.

 

It is interesting how country specific solutions are evolving. By definition, most of them can only come up indigenously.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more