The story of the Romanian young software engineer who reached Silicon Valley with a medical tech innovation

21-year-old Ion-Alexandru Secară is a Romanian-born software engineer who has been accepted into an internship programme in Silicon Valley for an innovation meant to help at correcting the body posture, PostureHealth. Passionate about coding since early childhood, Alexandru had an interesting life journey.

Born in Tecuci, Galati county (eastern Romania), he spent though most of his childhood in Iasi and Bucharest. When he was 13, his parents moved to Tbilisi, Georgia, where he attended high school. After that, he got several offers from universities in U.S. and Western Europe. Alexandru chose St. Andrews University in UK due to its strong IT Department.

He began his software engineering career at a start-up in Bucharest, Iron Sheep Tech, arguing he chose coding in order “to change the people’s life for the better”. In his spare time, Alexandru’s hobbies are sports, reading, drawing and his also passionate about social equality.

He recounted that in his last year of college he was accepted in a highly competitive programme, Silicon Valley Internship Program, which brings together the best software engineers in Silicon Valley to work for start-ups in California. The recruitment process lasts about 5 months.

Alexandru said that he had ‘flirted’ with the projects related to health since he was a kid. “I have never had any idols, just ideas! Since I was a child, I used to work on small projects that solved the problems I had noticed around. The first software I developed was a mobile phone app for people with Alzheimer who did not remember how to get back home. In time, I also develop special projects related to diabetes, blood tests and diet, but none lived up to the expectations. But, despite these projects did not work, I was content that I had learnt so much to develop high quality applications”, Alexandru stated.

How he has come up working on a programme on body posture? Starting from his own experience. “I realized my posture was awful and I started having back pains after staying in front of a laptop for hours. Looking around, I realized I am not the only one experiencing this issue. So, two years ago, I joined an open – source project that developed a software to detect the body of a person in the shape of a skeleton-like structure. Three months later, I left the project in order to develop my own algorithm to improve the body posture”.

The software he developed is reviewing the body posture in real time, announcing the person to have a break for physical exercises every one hour.

Now the app is open for financing, with Samsung being the first tech giant interested in it.