It is the story that led to the idea of Portito.
It happened when I was travelling in a public bus to Calicut for participating in Tathva 2015 conducted by NIT Calicut. We started our journey by 5.30, early morning in a KSRTC bus from Thrissur.
By midway I urged to urinate . I had no choice but to hold the urine for almost 3 hours that too in an air conditioned bus. It was as hard as an herculean task. I tried different postures in order to get out of this condition and some how managed to get control of my bladder till bus reached the Calicut bus terminal which has a toilet facility.
My friend always says that he can’t forget that run to the toilet after reaching bus terminal.
After returning back to home, I started thinking about this incident again and again. I thought of patients who can’t control their urine. Since there is no urinal system in busses, they should wait till the nearby stop reaches. But it is difficult for aged people and also diabetic patients etc who cannot control their urination easily. It is also a problem for the staff of bus that they cannot urinate on time.
That night, during my sleep I dreamt about this incident again and a solution for it. It was a vague dream which depicted a person urinating in a bag and urine collected comes out in solid form. When I woke up next morning, I discussed this concept with my parents who always supported from projects.
That was the beginning of Portito, the mobile urinal that serves you as a travel buddy when your bladder gives you trouble in public busses, packed with a cleansing mechanism all fitting in a backpack.
Even though my idea was rejected in most of the competitions, I submitted this mad idea to IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference 2016 paper competition though I didn’t even know the basic concepts about writing a technical paper.
Fortunately my paper got selected for the Conference and I was invited to present my paper in GHTC 2016 held at Seattle ,USA.
But I couldn’t attend the conference which was another story….. and I felt sad but it was a turning point in my life…!!
To be continued…..