I'm in National Geographic!

November 1, 2019

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/10/girls-in-science-feature/

My invention, the midiKEY, is featured in this National Geographic article, both online in the Girls in Science feature and the physical November 2019 issue Women: A Century of Change! Something I literally built and crocheted on my kitchen table, got me to demoing it at the international level and being photographed for a global publication! It's proof that anyone can start making things at home and take it to the next level.

I was very fortunate to meet Dina Litovsky on Media Day, the day before judging where finalists are able to rehearse their presentations and get interviewed by various media outlets and school groups who come to see the projects. To future ISEF finalists, make sure you dress nicely on Media Day! The photos I'm featured in are the second one in the article, with my hands crossed as I sat at my booth and a portrait taken in a separate session in the third slideshow. Some small details: I wear that ring and watch every day, in the background are my camera tripod and hardshell carryon I used to move my hardware components and electronics, and the most visible pin on my lanyard is one I designed to give at the pin exchange to prepresent the giant transistor water tower in my high school town, Holmdel, NJ. 

I think my design for the midiKEY was very striking and cyborg-like, the sensors encased in plastic tubes echoing artificial tendons and paralleling my vision for the future of hand controllers. I did a lot of literature review on glove-based designs with the knowledge that gloves are meant to be taken off at a point. While gloves are very one-size-fits-all and are easier to prototype, you lose a lot of tactile fingertip sensation when using in everyday life and your hands sweat while wearing gloves.

What if controllers could be fluid and naturally harness our movements without interference? Emerging technologies like AR/VR will rapidly develop once it becomes more fluid to use them and current controller technology can break the immersion. When the controllers are no longer a specialized hassle of equipment, we can more seamlessly adopt new digital technologies.

While the midiKEY was not designed as specifically an accessibility device, it is empowering to have a technology that bridges that gap for the disabled to digital interfaces. People unable to use a conventional keyboard have an alternative, a non-invasive way to gesture input into smart devices. I can see a future in porting sign language recognition systems to an open hand controller by adding an accelerometer sensor and machine learning for gestures.

So the two innovative things are my use of crocheted stretch sensors by borrowing from geometric properties of crocheted "wires" essentially and the open hand design. Both components exist separately: crocheted conductive thread has been used informally by the e-textiles community without much formal development and systems of wireless connected keyboard rings do exist but are uncomfortable and unnatural to use. I managed to build a prototype with roughly $35 of parts combining these existing ideas into a device that could send character input with certain patterns of finger bending.

It's a lot to explain, but if anything ISEF helped to improve my science communication skills by having me present over and over. There's so much skill in knowing what points to hit to properly communicate my ideas and adjust to audiences ranging from elementary school kids to judges with PhDs in my field to my own parents. (who still refer to my project as "that hand thing" but know what it does and generally how I built it by myself)

My ISEF experience brought me together with many of the great innovators of my generation in Phoenix, Arizona last May. I still see its connections today, where I find other finalists on campus and we talk about our projects and how we’re going forward in the world. I even ran into a fellow finalist from Delaware Valley Science Fairs - DVSF visiting MIT for a conference and we had a great coffee chat catching up about our respective projects.

ISEF was a transformative experience I’m so eternally grateful and fortunate to have been selected for. It was so empowering to have one of my homemade research projects be given an international platform and to be among like-minded teens. This is how we bring science to the everyday person: elevating ordinary insights into something that can be studied and taken further.

I want to speak especially to the craft of crochet that inspired the stretch sensors in my wearable device. Crochet and textile work has often been dismissed as “women’s work” throughout history and deemed not worthy of academic study as a side effect of sexism. Today there’s a community of scientists, engineers, designers, and mathematicians that are rediscovering and reviving the craft for study. I have had communications with Daina Taimina, a mathematician who changed our understanding of physical models of the hyperbolic plane with crochet from her childhood. I admire the work of Elisabetta Matsumoto, to whom knot theory is knit theory when investigating the mathematics and mechanics of the structure of textiles.

And I see so much further application for crochet and textile study. I’m currently working with soft robotics and conductive thread sensors in a research project in MIT CSAIL because of my background. The insight from my identity, as a female maker and crocheter, a knit wit, someone who’s good with their hands, allows me to make new connections and solve problems with my background.

And so we need respectful diversity. Because you never know where insights will come from.

Looking forward to having more inventions in more publications!