More than 101 million Indians live with diabetes, according to the ICMR-INDIAB study. For many of them, the first sign of trouble is not pain — it is the absence of it. Diabetic peripheral neuropathy quietly steals feeling from the feet, so a small cut or blister can go unnoticed until it becomes a wound that will not heal. A Bengaluru medtech startup called Yostra Labs has spent a decade building the answer: a handheld device that catches that nerve damage early, in a single visit, in any clinic.
NEURO TOUCH performing the vibration perception test. Image: Yostra Labs.
Yostra Labs was founded in 2014 by Vinayak Nandalike, Ram Mohan Rao, Dr Sanjay Sharma and Dr Maruthy K N — a team drawn from engineering, medicine and design — and incubated at the Bangalore Bioinnovation Centre. The idea for NEURO TOUCH came from a hackathon in 2015, and the company says it was formed with one goal: to stop preventable amputations.
Five tests in one hand
NEURO TOUCH is a 5-in-1 point-of-care screening device that packs five separate neuropathy tests into a single handheld unit weighing just 470 grams. It runs a digital monofilament test for tactile threshold, a vibration perception test, hot and cold perception tests, and an infrared skin-temperature measurement — covering both the small and large nerve fibres that diabetes damages first. Where a traditional screening once meant several bulky instruments and a trained specialist, NEURO TOUCH puts the whole workup in one battery-powered device that a doctor or paramedic can carry anywhere.
The device is built for the way Indian clinics actually work. It screens 30 to 50 patients on a single charge, sends results over Bluetooth to a smartphone app, and generates cloud-based reports so a doctor can track a patient’s feet over time. The company says the device is CE certified and ISO 13485 certified, holds Indian and US regulatory approvals, and is patented in India.
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NEURO TOUCH performing the digital monofilament test. Image: Yostra Labs.
Tested where it matters
The device has been put through its paces in Indian hospitals. A study led by researchers at Christian Medical College, Vellore, and published in the journal The Foot in 2022, tested NEURO TOUCH on 317 people with type 2 diabetes and found it an easy-to-use, compact and efficient way to screen for peripheral neuropathy. A separate prospective study across 12 primary healthcare facilities in Rajasthan — six urban and six rural, including tribal areas — screened 1,542 patients and showed the device works in last-mile clinics with limited resources.
The numbers on the ground are striking. The company says more than 1,750 NEURO TOUCH devices are now installed across India and have powered over 2,00,000 assessments. Yostra raised a ₹4 crore seed round led by Indian Angel Network, with Villgro and C-CAMP joining in, and its work has been recognised with a Karnataka IT.Biz Top 25 Innovators award and a Medicall Innovation Award.
A full foot-care toolkit
NEURO TOUCH is the flagship, but Yostra is building a whole diabetic foot-care portfolio around it. VELOX Care uses topical warm oxygen therapy to speed the healing of chronic wounds, while the NEURO KIT, NEURO CHECK and VASOPAD ABI extend the company’s screening to vascular assessment, and its Diabetic Foot Lab brings the full workup under one roof.
It is a quietly remarkable Indian medtech story: a small Bengaluru team, a device the size of a hair trimmer, and a mission to make sure that no diabetic foot loses its feeling unnoticed. In a country with 101 million people living with diabetes, a five-minute screening that can travel to the patient — not the other way round — is exactly the kind of engineering that saves limbs and lives.
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