Gurugram teen's AI app screens 1,650 villagers after grandma's eye illness

For most teenagers, weekends mean catching up with friends, playing games or simply getting away from schoolwork. For Siddhartha Manaktala, they have increasingly meant something else: travelling to government schools, villages and factories, setting up eye-screening camps and trying to find people who may be living with poor vision without even knowing it.The 17-year-old Class XII student from Gurugram has built EyeSpy, an artificial intelligence-powered smartphone platform designed to screen for seven eye diseases. What began as a self-taught experiment in coding and machine learning has since taken him into real-world communities, where he has seen first-hand how something as basic as an eye examination can remain out of reach for many people.According to ET Edge Insights, Manaktala has already screened more than 1,650 people at community eye camps across rural and suburban Haryana. An overwhelming 99% of those screened had never undergone an eye examination before.