Narayanan Komerath

Trying to remember why I am into Ayurveda [1]. All expert docs and Ayurvaidyas who know me will rush to certify my ignorance on any type of Medicine. But I do know that "Ayurveda" means "Knowledge Base for (long) Life(span)". I just want to share some thoughts on what is, and where it can take us.

Today Ayurveda is viewed variously as "Exotic". "Designer/ Celebrity Healthcare". "Holy" Or among fools as Mumbo Jumbo Witch Doctorese / 3rd World Quackery. WhatsApp Medicine. And they all argue about that.

Ayurveda is Deep Traditional Knowledge. Hard-won empirical science and technology, since when our ancestors moved from the Ocean to land and air, and our DNA and Genetic Memory evolved. It focuses more on deep/vertical knowledge about the community where it is practiced. In contrast, "modern” (called “English” where I live) medicine depends on vast horizontal Sample Sizes designed to minimize lawsuit potential by giving Statistically Significant Averages where the individual has no significance. If you say that a GM-RMA (I am not good with jargon since even before I got those 3 shots in 2021) vaccine caused horns to grow out of your head, they will say, “But 97.8958753% with an 8-Sigma Beta of 2.1, did not have horns grow so it is your fault!” Same Body Mass Index chart for scrawny little GMs (I know that stands for GrandMothers) or Sumo Wrestlers or gentle Erling Haaland.

Modern Ayurveda is still about deep knowledge. The Vaidyas read a lot - not just WhatsApp, and not shiny Celebrity Real Estate or Porsche Catalogs found in Allopathy offices. They KNOW what the "Modern" (Allopathy) doc is going to tell you if a flu catches you. And when you go there with knee pains at age 60. High-priced Allopathy Ortho Specialist: "You are OLD. Deal with it!" vs. 7 days of "uzhichil" that cured that pain – and with it all excuse to not walk 2km/day or up and down stairs, when 10 years older.

There are of course exceptions. The best (Allopathy) doc in my hometown, mother of Namesake Classmate (b.k.a “Good Narayanan”), took 2 minutes to decide, when I was diagnosed with “jaundice”. That was very common in those days here, but feared as Hepatitis B in the West. She asked my Mother to get Homeo tablets along with Ayurveda remedies (“keezhar nelli”), because those beat the heck out of anything available as “English” medicine. That’s why I was able to get on a plane and through Airport Immigration worrying needlessly if my eyes looked like a movie poster for “Omen”, and make it to first day of classes in The West in a few weeks.

I did not get into this for Ayurveda at all, but for people. IOW, myself.

Early in the Pandemic a College Trust's Exec called for help setting up a project to bring visibility (i.e., fees). I suggested going for a Ventilator like everyone else. Downloaded the 600MB Design-to Manufacture process for a Portable Hospital Ventilator from Medtronics, posted to protect their engineers from pests. “Portable” as in Mr. Haaland might carry one like he carried opposing defenders into their own goal. Superlative. Jewel-bearings. High-speed compressor, reminding docs of a Porsche turbocharger. Expensive. So I set the specs as our own Requirements Definition (ha!), and told the college that if nothing else, they could set up a Product Development course with an awesome Case Study.

Then realities of the COVID Lockdown desperation made the "leettil gray cells" (© Hercule Poirot) work. We had minimal design capability, all 2nd-year undergrads. It was hard to get anything delivered because the College was itself a Quarantine Hostel (remember?) The college also had (no way to sugarcoat this) “interesting” M.E. faculty, recruited from a place, whose ethics I had reason to know. (A detour: my own ambitions in Mechanical Design had been blown away with the Cyclone of 1975 that cruelly failed to hit IIT Madras in time to stop the Design of Machine Elements Final Exam.)

We had little access to parts or machining. My design was a stepper motor driving a plate on a lead screw to squeeze an AmbuBag – with a programmed speed profile. The kids drew that in AutoCAD, and then created a dynamic stress simulator with expensive software that one got from his part-time employer. They had no idea what the colors meant. I had a hazy notion: Red Bad, Green Good.

Our gizmo was to be enriched with software, with multiple pressure, proximity and motion sensors. Measurement. Aerospace Signal Processing. My Graduate Advisor loaned me Bendat & Piersol, “Random Data Analysis” [2] on Day 1 of Grad School (after that trip across the oceans wearing dark glasses like a Tamil Nad Movie Star) and I have browsed about 2 chapters of it. With our simple mechanical system, we could TAILOR our Ventilator to any patient quickly.

Then came a shock: hospitals were hooking patients to those $$M ventilators, sticking tubes in throats, and WAITING 24 HOURS before Docji ordered Nurseji to set parameters for the next week or until patient died suffering. With our system, sensors would tell us the patient's Lung Impedance - an indication of COVID-induced hardening (someone sent us horrible color X-Rays). In well under a minute (~15 Breaths Per Minute, variable from 10 to 36, so enough cycles to adapt). I learned the intake/exhaust profile and expected Lung Volume, and the needed residual pressure to avert lung collapse. We could adjust settings to match, not oppose and force, what the patient was trying to do, then gently push towards what she really needed. Adaptive Diagnostic Ventilator. A continuous diagnostic as well as life-saver. Even Mr. Messi could carry it in one hand and weave through a crowd dodging Mr. Haaland. Like an ambulance trying to get that patient to an urban hospital, while the emergency technician set parameters that the laptop computer told her to set, with a hospital doc on the phone to approve, seeing the same screen that the tech was seeing. Feasible.

Then those realities sank in. That hospital was itself the most dangerous place. What was needed was Telemedicine to get actual doctor approval, but the nurse/technician at the site to provide emergency help. Then why drag the patient to a far-away hospital to suffer and die alone? Relatives were not even allowed to accompany, in those horrible days – and those that did, risked never coming back.

What if the same facilities were available at a Clinic in the village?

But Telemedicine is exotic, expensive, right? In the USA I couldn’t dream of calling my dear doc and getting past their “wall” of Defenders Against Patients.

One day I saw a WA message forwarded from an older cousin: “this is genuine, I know the sender, a retired teacher”. She had tried calling this new (FREE!) telemedicine portal eSanjeevini.opd with much skepticism (“probably a Delhiwallah who cannot speak my language?”). She was connected to a kind doc who spoke Malayalam, listened to her, and sent her a prescription – which cured her acute shoulder pains.

And then I saw what the Ayurvedic Clinics in Keralam and eSanjeevini.opd were achieving, along with those incredibly brave ASHA workers who went into people’s homes. Medical doctors were also catching COVID. Many died, others were nearly killed by exhaustion and desperation. They never flinched.

Other diagnostic ideas hit my nerd-brain. What if the sound from the stethoscope handled by a nurse or an Ayur-Vaidya, was heard perfectly, live and recorded, in a hospital? Where doc leaned back in her LaZyBoy EZ chair saying “Oho!” “Aha”? What if temperature, BP ECG and knee-joint creaks and lung and tummy rumbles were conveyed likewise? 

I bet even I could develop the software to extract signs of periodic turbulence bursts - a sign of flow separating over bumps caused by plaque in arteries. These and much more can be done today (see my WAVES 2026 presentation on Opthalmic care [3]). I describe the Kardia pocket-sized “6-lead ECG equivalent” that stores one’s own heartbeat record on one’s phone, for transmission/comparison, and also checks if there are obvious “abnormalities” (compared to that DataBase of zillions of people worldwide). Also the Abbott Libre-2 Continuous Glucose Monitor. Just when I had finished celebrating that in this article, my new 14-day one, went out like a (super expensive!) light bulb as soon as I had stuck it on my arm. Oh well. One can get a Digital Stethoscope and record sound with high sensitivity. The B&P book [2] was from a time when the main problem was detecting an enemy submarine, from the clutter of ocean noise.

Peeking into a freezer in a lab late one night (we Grad Research Assistants had Master Keys to all labs [4]), I discovered why the pioneering BioEngineering group in my school needed an HP Fourier Analyzer ( bigger than most refrigerators) with a Huge 1 MEGABYTE hard disk bigger than an Extra-Large Pizza and heavier than a small table, and all 1024 characters of program length (compared to the smaller, cheaper Analyzer in “my” Combustion Lab which had no Hard Disc, just a paper tape reader, oscilloscope, teletype and program capacity of 256 characters.  Yes, aerospace engineers. Analyzing heart sounds – from stray dogs martyred in that cause by visiting docs from a nearby university hospital.

They used Laser Doppler velocimeters, to develop Ultrasonic Doppler velocimeters, then 2- dimensional Ultrasonic scans, then 3-dimensional, volume “images” using Computer-Assisted Tomography (“CAT” scans – cats would have loved its genesis from killing dogs).

Digital Signal Processing has advanced 4500 years’ worth in under 45 years. You don’t even need dedicated DSP chips: computer clock speeds are high enough for that to be software-driven. I got started down that path when I needed an FFT-based Cross-Spectral Analysis (see B&P) for my turbulent flame research. By then my flame research had shifted from an Anechoic Chamber (a.k.a. Fiberglass Foam Padded Sound-Proof Cell) to a facility that I built, with a budget and sources that they have still not figured out – so they named it the “Taj Mahal” in honor of my Bharat origin. In my day I had to type in 670 lines of IEEE-approved code from a book to do a “Fast Fourier Transform” efficiently on the new HP1000 A700 minicomputer. Better on a “CRT” than on an IBM card-punch. By the 2000s, my undergrad friend who is now a big Prof. in Singapore, succeeded in programming the entire Counter Processor for a Laser Doppler Velocimeter ($15000 bought new), because computer clocks had far surpassed the 1GHz clock speed of the Counter.

But I digress. I have to tell SOMEONE about those Days We Thought Would Never End (4). And you get picked today, thanks.

So you see how it all comes together in ALDT. Ayurveda-Led Diagnostic Telemedicine. The Ayurveda-Led part is described in [3]. Other papers in that session (I was Invited to Chair that session and then another – take THAT my dear sneering doc friends!) came from well-equipped (Indian-built diagnostic machines!) Ayurvedic Eye Hospitals about helping rural and urban schoolkids improve eyesight. Another from Ayurvaidyas helping people with diabetic nerve damage, foot damage. Also from Americans helping rural women in Uganda to use Vedic concepts to think like and become winners, the route to wellbeing through mental discipline. And Indians dealing with post-COVID stress. I learned about Pancha-Mukha Shiksha (Five-faceted Teaching) imparting skills in arts, dancing, music, sculpture, to kids along with regular courses, to build self-confidence. 

Elsewhere you see awesome ventures. Such as Sankara Netralaya, an established Eye Hospital [5], using a pair of special buses connected with a covered space as a Mobile Clinic, able to perform eye surgery including cataract surgery. In villages. Presumably with solar PV power and Internet connectivity. How’s that for diagnostic and even surgical capability? How difficult is it to have Mobile Ayurvedic Clinics with Telemedicine then?

This then is a quick cross-section of Ayurveda today, as I see it. A true holistic approach to help people build wellness, both mental and physical. Helping them build relationships better to work together and stay peaceful, happy and productive. And through it all, an opportunity to revisit my skills, as applicable to detect heart and other murmurs today as to submarines or jet flames and rocket exhausts in the Cold War 1970s.

I did get to use my PhD. Once. Circa 2011 I was asked to present “On Peer Review” to an international conference. I listed my one real credential on a slide: the title of my PhD Thesis. And asked: “Who Cares?” The ceiling nearly came down with the laughter. So much for that. But it did remove my fear to “wade in where Wise Doctors Fear To Tread”

ALDT is a hard sell in Modern Bharat. WHY? It seems so slam-dunk for Bharat conditions. Well… read my paper. Once “we” sent the concept to the Hon. Vice-Chancellor of Kerala’s biggest technical university. She scheduled a Zoom-con. With her assistant for Marketing. I explained to His Excellency that my real interest was in seeing Kerala Engineering Colleges developing the diagnostic instruments that Kerala and India needed so badly, in large numbers. (So I could play).

He responded brightly: “Why? We can always import those from China!”

 “Q.E.D.” (“Qua’id e Duh?”) as my friends say. I think I’ll buy a cheap digital stethoscope to play, probably Imported From China, but I still need some way to get the data into a computer. Let me ask an undergraduate.

Vande Mataram.

1.    Narayanan Komerath. Ayurveda Led Diagnostic Telemedicine – The Price of Procrastination. MyInd, July 23, 2026. https://myind.net/Home/viewArticle/ayurveda-led-diagnostic-telemedicine-the-price-of-procrastination

2.    Julius S. Bendat, Allan G. Pierson. Random Data: Analysis and Measurement Procedures. John Wiley & Sons, 1971.

3.    Narayanan Komerath and Padmavathy Komerath. “Ayurveda Led Diagnostic Telemedicine”. Proceedings of WAVES 2026, July 31, 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKq52llW4E8

4.    Mary Hopkin: “Those Were The Days”. On the Ed Sullivan show. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnxTT7XXMPA

5.    Sankara Netralaya – IIT Madras Mobile Eye Surgical Unit. https://www.sankaranethralaya.org/mobile-eye-surgical-unit.html