The achievement
For someone who cannot see, the difficult part of taking medicine can begin before any tablet is swallowed: two medicines can feel almost identical to the touch. Rehan Raza of Hyderabad knows the problem personally. “I am visually impaired myself,” he told The New Indian Express.
“When I was studying at Devnar School for the Blind, I had friends who were also visually impaired. Some of their parents were visually impaired too.” His friends identified medicines by touch, often through their parents — a method that fails, as he put it, when “two medicines felt similar, there was a possibility of confusion.”
The box that speaks
His answer, as the Express describes his design, is the Smart Medicine Box for the Visually Challenged. It has five compartments — one for a prescription, which can be written in Braille, and four for individual medicines. Each medicine compartment has a button that plays a recorded message announcing the medicine’s name, the prescribed dosage and the time it should be taken, so the user can listen before opening it; the recordings can be prepared with an AI-powered app feature that scans a medicine and retrieves its details.
The box also has automatically opening doors, an alarm for dose times, and runs on mains power or battery. The project was one of five from Telangana among the 62 recognised nationally at the 12th INSPIRE Awards–MANAK exhibition at Bharat Mandapam in October 2026. Rehan has completed his matriculation at Devnar and is studying Intermediate while preparing for engineering entrance examinations including JEE Main and EAMCET.
Think of one everyday task you do without thinking about sight — how would you redesign it for someone who cannot use sight at all? That is a question from us, not part of his record.
SOURCES
- The New Indian Express · Telangana students bag five national INSPIRE Awards, 15 October 2026 ↗ · Regional news report
- The New Indian Express feature on Rehan Raza (via republication) ↗ · Feature report
