This week’s Joy Beat is celebrating a trio of young people who have combined innovation, passion and problem-solving to make a real difference in people’s lives.
Arav Tyagi and Antonio Marzoratti are high school best friends and business partners, and they share a deep love of robotics. Tyagi, now at Boston University, and Marzoratti, now at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, came together with another WPI student, Ivan Zou, and thought of a powerful solution for those struggling with wheelchair portability: an affordable adapter that converts a manual wheelchair to one that runs of electricity. They’re this week’s nominees for the Joy Beat.
Tyagi and Marzoratti joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to discuss their accomplishments and what’s in store for the future. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.
Arun Rath: First, I want to hear from both of you about your background: how your interest in robotics began and when you decided to move from just being an interest and a hobby. Arav, let’s start with you.
Arav Tyagi: Well, I’ve loved robotics ever since I was a kid. But ever since I was maybe seven years old, I wanted to spend my life building things that would significantly improve the lives of a bunch of people.
Then, as I grew older and I got more skills by joining some robotics teams and working on side projects, I started thinking about ideas that, at the time, I couldn’t really build, but I kept it in the back of my head. So, later down the road, that’s when Antonio and I met each other and that’s when we started working on stuff.
Rath: Antonio, what about you?
Antonio Marzoratti: My love of building things really just came from: When I was younger, I used to build some things with my dad, and he taught me a lot about how stuff works — engineering, robotics. Later on, getting a bunch of friends, like Arav, it just became such a fun experience to build stuff with them and hang out. That’s really just what we do.
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If you’d like to nominate someone or something for the Joy Beat, leave us a voicemail at 617-300-BEAT (2328).
Rath: That’s brilliant. Let’s talk about this idea because anybody who struggles with mobility and has had to deal with a wheelchair knows that insurance will pay for a wheelchair pretty easily. But electric [wheelchairs] are a struggle. This idea — an affordable adapter that will convert a manual wheelchair that runs on electricity — seems so brilliant. How did you come up with this?
Marzoratti: Arav and I really were just thinking about things that we could build to start a company and just start working on something together. We wanted to do something that would help other people. That’s when some friends we had — they have muscular dystrophy — and one of their problems is they need to get a new electric wheelchair every couple of months because their disability just requires it. That brings them into a really hard financial situation that got us thinking about ways that we could solve that problem.
Tyagi: On top of that, another problem that we saw them having was: They would need these wheelchair-accessible vehicles just to transport their electric wheelchair. To me, it makes no sense that you buy this device that helps you live your life, but at the same time, it also restricts you from actually going out and doing the things that you want to do, because now you need to get this giant vehicle just to move your device around.
That’s another reason why we wanted to go with something that people could easily transfer themselves and fit in the back of any car.
Rath: So, you have this brilliant idea, and you’re at a point now where you have these skills. That’s still an awful lot to translate into actually making this work. How did you deal with the business side of things?
Tyagi: Yeah. Well, when we started out, we knew close to nothing about business, and we mainly focused on the engineering aspect of things. We would build things and then have people that we knew test them, go to senior centers and show it.
Although that counts as customer discovery and whatnot, we really didn’t know the other aspects of starting a business, like: how we were going to bring it to the market, who we were supposed to be talking to, and what the process of getting through the FDA was.
It was only after Antonio and I both joined business accelerator programs that we kind of started getting our foot into the business ideas of how we were going to take whatever we’re building and make it something that’s actually sustainable and can be delivered to people.
Rath: That’s awesome. Tell us a bit more about the prototyping process — working it through and the people that you worked with to make it happen.
Marzoratti: The first prototypes were as cheap as we possibly could make them because we didn’t really have the resources to go out and buy motors and try a bunch of different things.
We got a lot of donations from the robotics clubs that we’re in to use their pieces. From there, it was just an iterative process of trying a bunch of new things together, running it by people that we know in wheelchairs and seeing how they like it.
You know, one of the greatest things about PAWE — the Portable Affordable Wheelchair Enhancer — is that the idea didn’t come from our brains. They came from suggestions that people gave us and ideas that they had.
Tyagi: One quick thing that I want to highlight is how cheap we were in, I guess, the beginning stages of the development part. I think on the first prototype that we made, we spent a total of maybe $50 of our own money just getting gearboxes.
But, other than that, things were “borrowed” by our robotics team — quick shoutout to them — and even the wheelchair we got donated from one of our local senior centers. So, literally, nothing was from us.
Rath: Do you think being limited in resources in that way kind of kicked your engineering game up a bit? You now have this model, which is not expensive for people.
Marzoratti: Yeah, I think that was probably one of the greatest things that could have happened to us because, really, people don’t want to be spending thousands of dollars on this device, so it’s great to have had only limited resources and just build with what we had.
Tyagi: And it worked out, as broke high school students, too.
Rath: Finally, what has this whole experience taught you about ... well, I think, about everything? Life, joy, purpose and business — it just sounds like everything.
Marzoratti: Really, running Technotonin [Industries] has just become a huge part of our lives. What is really taught us — at least to me — is that it’s really important to get connections, talk to people, and things become a lot easier if you have a lot of friends and people who want to help you out.
Tyagi: Yeah, I think the last part is probably the most important thing. The best part, or the most important part, of starting any company is the community you surround yourself with, and the people that you have around you who want to help you get to where you want to be.
A year ago, we didn’t have the same people we have now. The people around us back then also really, really wanted to help us, but now, we have this entire community — this entire village of people — that are helping us and guiding us at every step, whether it be resources, mentorship or ideas designing something new, or funding to get to a place that we can get more funding. We have all these people supporting us.
Marzoratti: Technotonin is really like a family more than a company.
Tyagi: Yeah. When we won one of our pitch competitions, the first thing I think Antonio put in the group chat was, “Technotonin isn’t a company. Techno’s a family.”
If you’d like to nominate someone or something for the Joy Beat, leave us a voicemail at (617) 300 BEAT (2328).
