's zest for the unique. The director and chief executive officer of DyAnsys Inc heads a team that has applied complex mathematics to medical diagnosis. Nageshwar and his team of engineers and mathematicians believe "the most complex mechanism on earth, the body" is subject to engineering principles.
This belief has underpinned the making of a monitor, ANSiscope, that acts as an early warning system for a number of disorders.
An electrical engineer from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, first batch (class of 1964), Nageshwar joined Hewlett Packard in Europe soon after as a testing engineer.
His 25-year stint with HP in Europe and US was eventful. He was involved in standardising the 3.5 inch floppy in 1982-1983 (with Sony). Subsequently, a stint with Iomega saw Nageshwar participating in the Zip program that drove the company's European business.
In Europe, Nageshwar came into contact with mathematicians who have fuelled his current obsession: the monitor that will provide an early warning signal for disorders such as diabetes.
"The ECG (electrocardiogram) is a composite signal that contains everything; it contains a huge amount of information about the body," says Nageshwar. The information pumped out by the ECG remains underutilised, he feels.
Among the things sourced from an ECG is information on the autonomic nervous system, the part that controls important organs in the body. Interpreting the signals given by the autonomic nervous system is the key to having an early warning system, says Nageshwar.
The DyAnsys team was able to use complex mathematics to convert the information given by the ECG into decipherable signals. There is an US patent pending on the process, says Nageshwar.
Nageshwar, who drew his last pay as CEO of Iomega, has not forgotten the business angle to ANSiscope. He was in Chennai last week at a diabetes conference to promote ANSiscope.
Though the monitor can be used as a warning signal for quite a few problems, DyAnsys' decision to focus on diabetes is driven by the business angle.
"We had to generate revenue," says Nageshwar. The sheer number of diabetics around provides the business logic.
Nageshwar, now a US citizen, is very keen that ANSiscope's design should be relevant to India. "Whatever we did had to be safe, reliable and affordable."
He wants the monitor to be so handy and affordable that it becomes as common as a blood pressure monitor.
India figures in a big way in Nageshwar's plans for ANSiscope's manufacturing. It would have to be made here to make it really affordable.
Nageshwar, who is on the governing board of TVS Electronics, acknowledges the support received from the company's director, Gopal Srinivasan, in the ANSiscope project.
Nageshwar has a lot of his own money riding on the project. "We are two to three months from commercialising the project," he says.
A supporter of using local language peripherals to market computers in India, he used the school in his ancestral village in southern Tamil Nadu to test the receptiveness of local language peripherals.
"It went brilliantly," he says. Will ANSiscope go the same way? l
