In a dusty clinic in rural Bihar, a father once cradled his wheezing son, hoping for answers that wouldn’t come. The lone doctor suspected pneumonia but there were no tools to confirm it. The nearest diagnostic centre was hours away, and the family couldn’t afford the journey.
Such scenes are a dime a dozen in rural India, and it was during a moment of shared helplessness like this, when Tunir Sahoo, now 25, felt a spark that would redefine his life, and perhaps rural medicine itself.
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“It wasn’t an isolated case,” he says. “Over the following weeks, as I spoke to more than 60 rural doctors, I realised this wasn’t an isolated case, it was a systemic failure. That was the spark that led to JivaScope.”
Today, his innovation—a palm-sized AI heart and lung screening device called JivaScope—has won him the James Dyson Award India 2025, marking a major breakthrough in accessible diagnostics.
The James Dyson Award is an international competition to celebrate and fund innovative student inventions that solve real-world problems through engineering and design. It draws entries from around 28 countries, awards the global winner around £30,000 (approx.
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