Exploring Low Cost and DIY Electrochemical Methods for Micronutrient Detection; A Sociopolitical Analysis of the Origin and Development of the NEOM Megacity Project 7 views

Through the combination of my technical and STS research projects, I am exploring the effect of power structures and national interests on innovation. Together, these projects look at the concept of innovation in two different countries with varying governance models. My technical project is focused on conducting experiments on various micronutrients with a goal of making progress towards creating a noninvasive and accessible micronutrient sensor in the body. As of today, the primary method of sensing micronutrient concentrations is through blood tests, but drawing blood is highly invasive and lab tests require technical expertise and high costs, which make it highly inaccessible. However, malnutrition is a significant and growing public health concern in the United States, which may require cheap ways to continuously monitor micronutrient levels to fix the problem. This project, through UVA’s research labs, is using federal funding to fund innovation. My STS research project focuses on determining the influence of sociopolitical and economic factors in the design and implementation of NEOM’s smart-city infrastructure in Saudi Arabia. While proposed by Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed Bin Salman, in 2017, the construction is still ongoing and has been the face of several controversies and reviews by skeptics in the recent past. While seeming like an ambitious construction project from the outside, I am looking at how the country’s innovative and futuristic construction ideas for this megacity may have been strategically impacted by the issues the country is currently facing, and its current goals of improving its standing globally. While my technical project focuses on the use of federal funding and thus federal support to expand healthcare access for micronutrition testing by finding ways to reduce its cost and increase accessibility in the United States, my STS research paper focuses on Saudi Arabia’s version of innovation with NEOM. In this megacity, instead of promoting accessibility, the crown prince is imposing rules and constraints that may widen the socioeconomic divide instead of reducing it, by increasing accessibility to the smart city’s newer technologies and facilities only to a certain “cognitive elite”.

BS (Bachelor of Science)

NEOM; Saudi Arabia; ANT

School of Engineering and Applied Science Bachelor of Science in Computer Science Technical Advisor: Afsaneh Doryab STS Advisor: Coleen Carrigan Technical Team Members:

All rights reserved by the author (no additional license for public reuse)

2026-05-09