Speaking at the Speed of Sight
Human Health and Behavior
Mabel Jenson
- Grade:
- 7
- Teacher:
- Jeannette Olsson
Around the world, many suffer from Locked-in syndrome: a rare neurological disorder where a person is completely aware but cannot move most of their muscles. They can, however, use the muscles that control blinking. I have strived to create an app that can sense eye blinks to allow communication. My app allows someone to blink in Morse Code. It interprets the blinks using a simple AI model, allowing the user to type with their eyes.
Your project is incredibly inspiring. You identified a real challenge faced by people with severe communication limitations and created a thoughtful, innovative solution. Building a working app that detects blinks, interprets Morse code, and turns it into text is an impressive achievement at any age. Your dedication shows in your detailed testing, your many iterations, and the way you taught yourself new coding skills along the way. This project shows creativity, compassion, and true engineering spirit. Keep exploring big ideas—you clearly have the talent and determination to make meaningful technology that helps others.
Great job on an extraordinary engineering project! Your goal of creating a free, accessible communication tool for people with Locked-in Syndrome is both inspiring and highly sophisticated. As a researcher, I was very impressed by your systematic testing achieving 100% accuracy on several trials is a testament to the quality of your AI model.
I noticed you mentioned the difficulty of setting up the emulator and debugging ‘silly little errors’ that took hours to fix. Don’t be discouraged by these hurdles! Troubleshooting is the heart of engineering, and your ability to be resourceful and master every line of your code is exactly what makes a great scientist. Your transparency about the AI’s limitations in low-light environments shows a high level of scientific honesty. This is a vital contribution to the field of assistive technology.
This is a very thoughtful project that addresses a real and often overlooked challenge. I really appreciate how you focused on making communication more accessible for people with locked in syndrome, especially by aiming to keep the solution simple and free. Your explanation of the development process, from learning a new programming language to testing the prototype, clearly shows persistence and genuine curiosity. The testing results and discussion of accuracy also help the reader understand how the system works in practice. One suggestion would be to explore ways to improve performance in different lighting conditions since that seems to affect the accuracy of blink detection. Overall, this is a creative and meaningful approach that shows both technical effort and empathy for people who need better communication tools.
It is so wonderful to see someone at such a young age accomplish so much. That shows discipline, dedication, and a desire to reach beyond what is known today to hopefully help others in the future. Keep it up. People with disabilities seem to be lost sometimes because we just don’t know how to communicate with them or how to approach the challenges that seems so noticeable to us, but without thought of how difficult it is for them. You are making a valuable contribution right now and I am excited to see what it is. You can do in the future!