It was a normal night for 19-year old Harsh Songa who lived in Bhopal, but when he woke up of a Facebook notification at 2am, he saw was totally like a dream for any teen aged boy, it was social media giant Facebook’s chief operating officer (COO) Sheryl Sandberg published a post about him and his startup, My Child App.
Post by Sandberg, described about Songra and his app as an instance of startups being supported by Facebook under its FBStart programme.
“We’re supporting developers like Harsh who have great ideas but can’t always access the resources they need,” she posted.
What Sandberg’s post said:
Harsh Songra is a 19 year old software developer from India. He grew up with a condition called dyspraxia. Because he lived in a small town without access to health information, he wasn’t properly diagnosed until he was nine years old. Harsh wanted to make sure other families didn’t have to go through the same thing, so he built an app called MyChild that helps parents find out if their child might have a developmental disorder. It provides basic screening by asking simple questions – and can even recommend specialist doctors.
We’re supporting developers like Harsh who have great ideas but can’t always access the resources they need. Facebook’s FBStart program helped MyChild get started by providing technical support, so that Harsh could focus on making the app even better. If you’re a developer with a big idea, you can apply for free tools and mentorship from Facebook here: http://fbstart.com
My Child, an Android app, that tells parents if their child is likely to be suffering from a developmental disorder by processing basic inputs such as the child’s height, weight and gender, in just 45 seconds.
It took Songra’s parents nine years to get him diagnosed of having dyspraxia, a developmental disorder.
The late diagnosis meant that his parents could do nothing to help. But Songra’s father, who was a hardware engineer, taught him to use the computer at a young age and he used computer games to overcome the problems of coordination and movement that dyspraxia brings with it.
When he was sixteen, Songra was experimenting with algorithms. His drive to do something that will guide parents like his and two years of research helped him build My Child all by himself.
Launched in January this year and built with the help of Facebook’s platform Parse and promoted with other tools such as Facebook ads, Hootsuite and Mailchimp, the app had seen downloads from across six continents.