Punjab– Oct. 7th, 2026 – For Prabinder Singh, Anish Grover and Deepesh Kakkar, the problem they set out to solve was not an abstract one. All three young students from SAS Nagar, Punjab, have seen the impact of stroke on their own families. That personal connection led them to a question: what happens to stroke patients once they leave the hospital?
The three friends, who study at the same college and are currently in their third and fourth years of engineering, are developing NeuroTrace, an AI-powered smartphone solution designed to help families monitor stroke survivors at home. Their innovation is among the Top 20 teams of Samsung Solve for Tomorrow 2026.
The challenge they are addressing is the gap between hospital care and everyday monitoring. After discharge, families often become the primary caregivers, but subtle neurological changes may be difficult to recognise until they develop into a serious emergency.
NeuroTrace proposes an accessible, wearable-free approach. The platform uses a 45-second daily check-in through a smartphone’s camera and microphone to capture three signals: voice patterns, facial movement and reaction time. Over the first 35 days, the system learns an individual patient’s neurological baseline. It then looks for sustained deviations from that baseline.
To reduce false alarms, NeuroTrace uses multimodal AI, with alerts triggered only when two signals show a deviation simultaneously. Family caregivers can receive the alerts in plain-language Hindi through WhatsApp, creating a simple layer of monitoring without requiring specialised equipment or a wearable device.
For the three friends, the technology was only one part of the challenge. Their experience at the Samsung Solve for Tomorrow Bootcamp pushed them to think more deeply about who would actually use the solution, whose needs they were solving for and how the idea could work beyond a prototype.
“Design thinking helped us understand who our end user really is and who we should be speaking to. The idea became much better once we started looking at it from the user’s perspective,” said Prabinder Singh.
The team also came to recognise the importance of medical data and the responsibility that comes with handling it. As they think about developing NeuroTrace as a long-term solution, data security and privacy have become central to their approach.
“We initially focused a lot on the technology and how to build the solution. At the Bootcamp, we started thinking about the larger picture—our end user, the problem we were solving and how we could make this a long-term solution,” said Anish Grover.
The personal nature of the problem has kept the team closely connected to their mission. “All three of us have family members who have experienced this. So this was a common problem for us, and we wanted to work on something that could actually help,” said Deepesh Kakkar.
Their ambitions extend beyond NeuroTrace itself. All three say they have wanted to become entrepreneurs, but for them, entrepreneurship is closely tied to solving a problem that matters.
“We all wanted to become entrepreneurs, but we also wanted to solve a real problem. Now we have the idea, and we will see what support we can get to take it forward,” said Prabinder.
As one of Samsung Solve for Tomorrow 2026 Top 20 teams, NeuroTrace is now focused on taking its technology and understanding of the problem to the next stage. For three friends who began with a problem they had witnessed within their own families, the journey is an attempt to build a simple, accessible safety net for patients and the people who care for them—long after they leave the hospital.