This 16-year-old is building AI apps that could revolutionize healthcare
By Carl Samson
March 13, 2024
A 16-year-old high school student from Palo Alto, California, has gained widespread recognition for utilizing AI to build applications that help advance healthcare solutions.
Key points:
- Adrit Rao, currently a research intern at Stanford University, has developed AutoABI, an iOS app that detects peripheral arterial disease (PAD) by listening to arterial sounds in the ankles. Clinical trials, as well as a patent application, are underway.
- The Indian American prodigy has also worked on A4, an AI system that measures abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAAs) from CT scans, and contributed to Stanford’s Spezi, an open-source framework for building digital health apps.
The details:
- Rao began coding at age 8 with simple block programming. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he taught himself how to make apps using YouTube and other online resources.
- He won Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) Swift Student Challenge at age 12. This landed him a meeting with CEO Tim Cook.
- At 13, he joined Stanford for a research internship. He has since focused on building AI-powered apps for healthcare and co-authored over a dozen research papers.
- The Palo Alto High School junior has also developed non-health apps currently available on the App Store. These include MoTV, which provides information on movies and TV shows; Signer, which translates sign language gestures into speech; Virtuthon, which allows for a virtual walkathon experience; and Get Involved Service Hours, which helps students track their community service hours.
- He is also the founder and CEO of Aretech Inc., a nonprofit that teaches app development to young people. Additionally, he is a board member of the Get Involved Foundation, which he collaborated with for his community service hours app.
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