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.
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.
SOURCES
- Society for Science · Regeneron ISEF 2025 full awards list ↗ · Official awards list
- EQ Mint · PawPath profile (adapted from YourStory) ↗ · Profile interview
