On August 8, 2019 PAANI took first place in the Invent@SU final competition winning $5,000 in funding. Through the Invent@SU program, undergraduate students are transformed into inventors as they design, prototype and pitch original devices. Students learn about design, ideation and intellectual property, then conceive an original invention, prototype the invention and refine it in response to weekly feedback from diverse audiences of guest evaluators.
During the six week program, Chatterjee and Howard designed and built a prototype for an invention combining a traditional sari with advanced water filters built in. The device is simple, familiar, and practical from families who already use the sari cloth for filtering.
