Thrombocizer: an IoT leg-exercise device for paralyzed patients

Thrombocizer is a medical-device prototype I built with a small team — an IoT device that assists leg movement for paralyzed patients, aiming to reduce the risk of clots that come from lying still. It won 1st Runner-Up at MEDHA 2024, and we later took an improved version to a hackathon at IIT Bombay.

The team and my part

It was a team of four: me, one person from an electronics background, and two MBBS students. The medical students and the electronics engineer worked on the physical device — the components, the wiring and soldering, and the 3D-printed prototype, which we iterated on several times together.

My part was the software and the microcontroller side: the ESP32 firmware, the wiring logic, and a web dashboard for real-time monitoring, built with Node.js and WebSockets so a caregiver could watch and control the exercise session live.

What I took away

This was my first real hardware project, and working with people from completely different backgrounds — medicine and electronics — was the actual lesson. I had to translate between “what the device needs to do for a patient” and “what the ESP32 can actually do”, and get a real-time monitoring loop working reliably over WebSockets. Placing at a national hackathon and then presenting at IIT Bombay was a good early sign that the idea, and the build, held up.