life better for people
with autism and their
families, the trick is to
make the technology
secondary.
JULIE KIENTZ, 331 in 88
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one at Compaq in which she wrote debug- ging programs for a microchip. “It was really hard for me to see that connection between what I thought was the really impactful work and what I was doing on a day-to-day basis,” she says, speaking in an office littered with geek ephemera such as a software engineer Barbie doll. (Kientz is married to Washington professor Shwetak Patel, an Innovator Under 35 in 2009.)
Through her work with autistic chil- dren, Kientz learned that federal health officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were looking for ways to spot signs of autism and developmental delays earlier in children’s lives. When she dove in, interviewing parents and doc- tors, she realized that many families were already recording information the govern- ment was looking for, but their formats— snapshots, video, baby books—were hard to integrate with the conventional track- ing data gathered by health professionals. Kientz wondered if there was a way to combine the two kinds of data gathering. That led her to build a computer program called Baby Steps while she was still in grad school. It combined traditional baby- book functions (asking parents to post pictures of sentimental moments like a child’s first trip to the zoo or to Grandma’s house) with ways to record specific devel- opmental milestones (is the baby mak- ing eye contact?). Baby Steps has been tested by a handful of families, and Kientz has a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to explore whether the program could scale up to track mile- stones for any child in Washington state whose parents want to take part.
In this project, too, Kientz is deciding how to develop the technology only after first understanding how people might use it. She found that many Hispanic fami- lies in Washington don’t have home PCs and are more likely to go online using phones. So she added phone-friendly features such as the ability to respond to
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prompts from text messages or Twit- ter. For example, parents can follow a Twitter account that corresponds to the month their child was born. They might get a prompt that includes an age-appropriate milestone and a code so that their reply will get filed in the database. They might see:
@BabySteps_Nov2012: Does your baby turn his/her head in the direction of a loud noise? #baby68
And then they could respond:
@juliekientz: #Yes #Maya turns her head in the direction of a loud noise #baby68
For another project, Kientz is try- ing to make it much easier for people with sleep disorders to figure out what’s wrong. Typically, they might have to go to a lab and get loaded up with elec- trodes for the night; later, they might sit in front of specialized equipment to test things like how their reaction time suffers when they’re experiencing a sleep deficit. Kientz wanted to help people do all this themselves, at home. So she and collaborators from UW’s medical and nursing programs built a prototype called Lullaby. It’s a box with light, temperature, and motion sensors sticking out, wired to a computer and a touch-screen tablet. Patients wear an unobtrusive commercial gadget such as the Fitbit, which tracks exercise by day and sleep patterns by night. They don’t have to fill out sleep logs, which are notoriously inaccurate. And to replace the lab exams measuring reac- tion times, Kientz’s group developed a smartphone app that lets people test themselves.
Getting inspiration from actual human problems is leading Kientz and her graduate students in sur- prising directions—such as software they recently developed to help visu- ally impaired people do yoga. “I feel like there’s two routes you can go in research in my field,” she says. “You can help a lot of people in a little way. Or you can help a few people in a big way.” —Jessica Mintz
It’s 2008. Eric Migicovsky is rack- ing up kilometers every day on his sturdy blue opafiets—the no-nonsense bicycle beloved by Netherlanders. He’s wheeling to classes at Delft University of Technol- ogy and other points in a city famous for its canals and blue-and-white pottery.
Life’s great for the young Canadian engineer on a year abroad from Ontario’s University of Waterloo. Except for one constant irritant. His cell phone never stops chiming, chirping, or vibrating. And prudence requires two hands firmly grip-
ping the handlebars while veering through traffic between those picturesque canals. “I read a survey that said the average person pulls out their cell phone 120 times a day,” he says. “It occurred to me, ‘Hey, what if I could just do it on my wrist?’”
Back in his dorm room, Migicovsky started fiddling with an electronic bread- board, an Arduino microcontroller,
he
invented
the
smart
watch.
ERIC MIGICOVSKY, 27Photograph by Winni Wintermeyer
275,000
Number of Pebble
watches sold PREVIOU
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