By Dr. Aniruddha Joshi
Posted on
Ayurveda: An engineer’s perspective
Ayurveda has beautifully covered all the aspects of life while defining the daily routine of a person. Engineering is also trying to simplify the routine by building the connecting blocks.
Ayurveda is the science of life, which describes balance, lifestyle, happiness, soul, etc. It is an ancient wisdom, but is extremely relevant even today in every field. Today’s engineers are talking about new ideas and start-ups. With limited knowledge of Ayurveda achieved while working on its digitization, I see super relevance of Ayurveda in today’s trends of start-ups:
Trend 1 : Personalized and predictive healthcare:
Ayurveda strongly believes in the personal healthy baseline, deviation of health from that baseline, implications of the deviation (today as well as in near future) and ways to bring back the balance. We all have slowly realized the shortcomings of the frequent use of antibiotics and studying alternative methods to reduce the side effects of modern medicine.
Trend 2 : Internet of Things (IoT) :
Covers the idea of different sensors continuously sending data from various objects to the centralized server and the data analytics find meanings. Ayurveda believes that the nature’s centralized cloud server is continuously collecting data from all people, their movements, their breathing patterns, their city planning, plants, rivers;finding trends in the complete datasets; and accordingly taking its steps towards maintaining the earth’s balance.
Trend 3 : Machine learning:
Covers the learning process of a machine from enormous data. Ayurveda has created learning, based on all the aspects of life, from the micro cosmos to the macro cosmos. Of course, there is still a strong need to decipher that knowledge in Sanskrit texts into today’s understandable language of science of data, numbers and statistics.
Trend 4 : Apps for childrenand workforce :
Any person is in the healthy baseline (prakruti) state in his or her early age. The best time to build the physic, mind, learning languages, sanskaram is at that age; before the environmental forces act on the child.Furthermore, every person is unique with Vata, Pitta, Kapha or Satva, Rajas, Tamas combinations. Depending upon these qualities, he or she is suitable for different occupations in life. When achild is groomed in the right direction so that he or shegets into a “profession”in line with own qualities, the outcome is always multi-fold.
Trend 5 : Virtual reality (VR)&Augmented reality (AR) :
Hard to believe yet, but meditation and deep concentration can take a person into the virtual world and makes things simpler. There are stories of great scientists solving a complex research problem because of meditation and of course knowledge + focus.
Trend 6 : Social networks & e-commerce :
It covers tools to connect people with needs.Ayurveda believes in the dynamic connections of people, processes and things. Intelligent digital ecosystem provides services supporting these dynamics. Again, companies like Amazon are solving the need of personalization and prediction through machine learning to provide the best experience.
Trend 7 : Adaptive Security Architecture / Cybersecurity :
If we talk just about the human body, there are complex shields at every organ’s entrance to fight the viruses attacking on them. It is very important to continuously upgrade the antivirus definitions of these human organ systems through present day’s suitable food and exercises (considering winter, time of the day, prakruti, vikruti, environmental forces). Keeping the shield adaptively ready for any type of attack (prevention) is the key to a long and healthy life than later fighting with medicines.
Trend 8 : Wearables :
It is more of IoT on human body in which different signals are captured from the body e.g. Fitbit, Google glass, smart shoes. Ayurveda has Ashtavidh pariksha to cover different sensors including pressure sensor (nadi), photo plethysmograph sensor (heart signal), mike sensor (voice), camera photo sensor (tongue, face, skin, akruti, etc.) and so on. All this data can be analyzed together to understand the dynamics of heart, brain and other organs.
Ayurveda has beautifully covered all the aspects of life while defining the daily routine of a person. Engineering is also trying to simplify the routine by building the connecting blocks. I strongly believe and recommend incorporating the “ancient wisdom of balance” before generating or re-establishing the science and technology in daily life.
Innovator of Nadi Tarangini and Founder& CEO of Atreya Innovations, Dr. Aniruddha Joshi is Phd, Computer Science from IIT Mumbai.
