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What's the fastest growing threat to Americans' health?
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Cancer? Heart attacks? Diabetes?
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The answer is actually none of these;
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it's Alzheimer's disease.
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Every 67 seconds,
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someone in the United States is diagnosed with Alzheimer's.
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As the number of Alzheimer's patients triples by the year 2050,
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caring for them, as well as the rest of the aging population,
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will become an overwhelming societal challenge.
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My family has experienced firsthand
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the struggles of caring for an Alzheimer's patient.
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Growing up in a family with three generations,
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I've always been very close to my grandfather.
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When I was four years old,
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my grandfather and I were walking in a park in Japan
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when he suddenly got lost.
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It was one of the scariest moments I've ever experienced in my life,
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and it was also the first instance that informed us
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that my grandfather had Alzheimer's disease.
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Over the past 12 years, his condition got worse and worse,
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and his wandering in particular caused my family a lot of stress.
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My aunt, his primary caregiver,
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really struggled to stay awake at night to keep an eye on him,
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and even then often failed to catch him leaving the bed.
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I became really concerned about my aunt's well-being
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as well as my grandfather's safety.
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I searched extensively for a solution that could help my family's problems,
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but couldn't find one.
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Then, one night about two years ago,
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I was looking after my grandfather and I saw him stepping out of the bed.
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The moment his foot landed on the floor,
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I thought, why don't I put a pressure sensor on the heel of his foot?
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Once he stepped onto the floor and out of the bed,
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the pressure sensor would detect an increase in pressure caused by body weight
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and then wirelessly send an audible alert to the caregiver's smartphone.
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That way, my aunt could sleep much better at night
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without having to worry about my grandfather's wandering.
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So now I'd like to perform a demonstration of this sock.
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Could I please have my sock model on the stage?
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Great.
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So once the patient steps onto the floor --
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(Ringing) --
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an alert is sent to the caregiver's smartphone.
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Thank you. (Applause)
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Thank you, sock model.
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So this is a drawing of my preliminary design.
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My desire to create a sensor-based technology
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perhaps stemmed from my lifelong love for sensors and technology.
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When I was six years old,
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an elderly family friend fell down in the bathroom
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and suffered severe injuries.
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I became concerned about my own grandparents
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and decided to invent a smart bathroom system.
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Motion sensors would be installed inside the tiles of bathroom floors
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to detect the falls of elderly patients whenever they fell down in the bathroom.
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Since I was only six years old at the time
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and I hadn't graduated from kindergarten yet,
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I didn't have the necessary resources and tools to translate my idea into reality,
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but nonetheless, my research experience
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really implanted in me a firm desire to use sensors to help the elderly people.
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I really believe that sensors can improve the quality of life of the elderly.
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When I laid out my plan, I realized that I faced three main challenges:
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first, creating a sensor;
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second, designing a circuit;
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and third, coding a smartphone app.
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This made me realize that my project was actually much harder to realize
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than I initially had thought it to be.
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First, I had to create a wearable sensor that was thin and flexible enough
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to be worn comfortably on the bottom of the patient's foot.
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After extensive research and testing of different materials like rubber,
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which I realized was too thick to be worn snugly on the bottom of the foot,
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I decided to print a film sensor
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with electrically conductive pressure-sensitive ink particles.
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Once pressure is applied, the connectivity between the particles increases.
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Therefore, I could design a circuit that would measure pressure
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by measuring electrical resistance.
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Next, I had to design a wearable wireless circuit,
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but wireless signal transmission consumes lots of power
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and requires heavy, bulky batteries.
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Thankfully, I was able to find out about the Bluetooth low energy technology,
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which consumes very little power and can be driven by a coin-sized battery.
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This prevented the system from dying in the middle of the night.
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Lastly, I had to code a smartphone app that would essentially transform
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the care-giver's smartphone into a remote monitor.
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For this, I had to expand upon my knowledge of coding with Java and XCode
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and I also had to learn about how to code for Bluetooth low energy devices
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by watching YouTube tutorials and reading various textbooks.
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Integrating these components, I was able to successfully create two prototypes,
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one in which the sensor is embedded inside a sock,
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and another that's a re-attachable sensor assembly
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that can be adhered anywhere that makes contact
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with the bottom of the patient's foot.
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I've tested the device on my grandfather for about a year now,
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and it's had a 100 percent success rate
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in detecting the over 900 known cases of his wandering.
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Last summer, I was able to beta test my device
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at several residential care facilities in California,
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and I'm currently incorporating the feedback
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to further improve the device into a marketable product.
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Testing the device on a number of patients
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made me realize that I needed to invent solutions
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for people who didn't want to wear socks to sleep at night.
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So sensor data, collected on a vast number of patients,
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can be useful for improving patient care
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and also leading to a cure for the disease, possibly.
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For example, I'm currently examining
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correlations between the frequency of a patient's nightly wandering
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and his or her daily activities and diet.
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One thing I'll never forget is when my device first caught
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my grandfather's wandering out of bed at night.
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At that moment, I was really struck by the power of technology
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to change lives for the better.
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People living happily and healthfully --
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that's the world that I imagine.
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Thank you very much.
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(Applause)