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Animal sciences — wearable gait analysis · INDIA

Anshul Bhatt

Built PawPath, an IMU-based gait-detection and disease-screening tool for dogs (project ANIM005), which won the Second Award in Animal Sciences at Regeneron ISEF 2025. Also a bridge world champion: three Under-16 golds at the 2022 World Youth Transnational Bridge Championships.

16 in 2025 (YourStory profile); born October 2008 (Wikipedia, secondary)

Maharashtra · India

Anshul Bhatt in conversation with Bill Gates in a bridge tournament hall
Anshul Bhatt with Bill Gates at the North American Bridge Championships, Las Vegas, December 2024 — a photograph from his bridge career, not of PawPath
Image source ↗ · NewsVoir
Source photograph · credit and provenance below

BEHIND THE RESULT

The achievement

Anshul Bhatt of Mumbai is best known as a bridge player — in 2022, at 13, he won all three gold medals in the Under-16 events at the World Youth Transnational Bridge Championships in Italy. In May 2025, a very different project took him to Columbus, Ohio: PawPath, his wearable gait-analysis tool for dogs, won the Second Award in Animal Sciences at the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair, the world’s largest school science competition. He was 16 and in Grade XI at Dhirubhai Ambani International School, Mumbai.

How PawPath began

On a family trek, Anshul noticed his dog Max limping and licking his paws; a vet diagnosed late-stage arthritis, too advanced to treat properly. “It was heartbreaking to see Max constantly in pain,” he told YourStory. “By the time we discovered it, treatments weren’t really working.” He learned that vets detect such diseases largely by watching how a dog walks, and that the precise tools — force plates, high-speed cameras — are expensive and live in specialist clinics. So he built PawPath: four small wireless sensor modules that strap to a dog’s legs and record its movement 50 to 100 times a second. A machine-learning model he trained on gait recordings from more than 200 dogs then screens for patterns linked to arthritis, ataxia and other orthopaedic and neurological problems. He priced the device at about ₹5,000 and refined it with veterinarians and with academics at IIT Bombay.

A spark to explore

What problem close to your own home — like an animal you love being unwell — could you start measuring properly, instead of only worrying about it? That is a question from us, not part of his record.

Source-based story · the activities are prompts for readers.

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The achievement, in context.

Regeneron ISEF 2025 — Second Award, Animal Sciences

Built PawPath, an IMU-based gait-detection and disease-screening tool for dogs (project ANIM005), which won the Second Award in Animal Sciences at Regeneron ISEF 2025. Also a bridge world champion: three Under-16 golds at the 2022 World Youth Transnational Bridge Championships.

2025-05-16 · Supporting source ↗

Sources you can explore.

Society for Science · Regeneron ISEF 2025 full awards list ↗Official awards list

EQ Mint · PawPath profile (adapted from YourStory) ↗Profile interview

Original source ↗

Another spark to discover.

More in this field →
Avighna Chhatrapati smiling at the cameraCompetitive programming (informatics olympiads)

Maharashtra · India

Avighna Chhatrapati

Mumbai student who medalled at INOI three years running — silver 2024, silver 2025, gold 2026 (one of ten) — qualifying for the IOITC each year, then won bronze at APIO-2026 as one of India’s six official participants. Co-founder and lead trainer of SPOI, a free olympiad-mentorship programme. Bombay Scottish School, Mumbai.

No age published; Class 12 at INOI-2026 (February 2026)

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SPOI (spoi.org.in) ↗Source photograph · see credit