Abstract
This portfolio brings together two projects that, despite being different in method and subject matter, are both focused on the broader question of how technology should responsibly serve people. My technical project, JoyLab, is centered around building an interactive and therapeutic toy for children with cerebral palsy and was inspired by a local Charlottesville family. The project was designed to support the needs of a child who struggled with motor and sensory skills and had difficulty using many traditional toys on the market. Our team developed a system that consisted of three main parts which are a physical toy, a wearable wristband, and a mobile companion application. The toy utilizes lights, sound, vibration, buttons, and sensors to create an engaging play experience while the wristband captures movement and reaction-time data. The companion application gives parents and caregivers the ability to control settings such as volume, LED behavior, vibration modes, and game types while also displaying tracked performance data in a way that is simple and easy to understand. Together, these project components create a toy that is enjoyable, adaptive, informative, and potentially useful in therapeutic settings.
From an engineering standpoint, JoyLab required the integration of hardware, firmware, wireless communication, and user interface design into one system. The toy subsystem used an ESP32 microcontroller connected to LED strips, push buttons, vibration motors, a speaker, an infrared sensor, and a force sensor. The wristband was built around a custom PCB containing an ESP32-PICO-MINI-02, a Bosch BMI323 IMU, a charger, and a buck-boost converter so that motion data could be captured and transmitted reliably over Bluetooth Low Energy. The mobile app, developed in React and Python, served as the central controller and data interface for the whole system. A significant challenge in our development of this system, however, was making all of these components accurately communicate in real time while keeping its safety, durability, and ease of use for a young child when interacting. Testing validated the application’s ability to control the toy and process sensor feedback, the toy’s LED, audio, and touch-sensitive systems functionality as designed, and the wristband’s successful transmission of motion data via Bluetooth Low Energy. Moreover, the main goals of this project were accessibility, affordability, and safety which were achieved by keeping costs within the budget and designing the toy with low-voltage electronics, secure covers, and materials that are safe for children.
My STS project, The Illusion of Control: Consent and Accountability in the Apple Watch Data Ecosystem, investigates a very different type of technological system through the lens of the consumer wearable. Instead of asking whether a device functions correctly in a technical sense, this paper asks what kinds of social, ethical, and political relationships are built into a device and its surrounding infrastructure. The project focuses on how Apple constructs and manages consent, ownership, and accountability in the Apple Watch ecosystem with the central argument being that Apple presents the Apple Watch as a privacy-centered and user-controlled device, but this sense of control is often more systematic than it is real. Users may come across permission prompts and settings menus that give them a sense of transparency and choice with their device usage, but once their data moves through Apple Health, iCloud, and HealthKit into a much wider network of third parties, that data becomes much more difficult to follow and control. Because of this, the project argues that user consent functions less as meaningful control and more as a formal step in a much larger system of data.
The STS paper uses discourse analysis and sociotechnical analysis to study this issue by looking at Apple’s public privacy language, onboarding prompts, and platform design along with broader STS concepts such as actor-network theory and situated knowledge. Key actors within the Apple Watch data ecosystem are identified such as users, third-party developers, regulators, and researchers, and the paper argues that the relationships among these actors shape privacy outcomes. It also examines major controversies embedded in the technology, including consent fatigue, downstream accountability, and the regulatory gray area between consumer data and health data. The paper concludes that privacy in wearable ecosystems should be treated as an ongoing governance problem that requires clearer accountability, better visibility into data movement, and stronger limits on default data sharing.
Although these two projects differ in topic, they are closely related in their larger concerns with both asking what it really means to design technology around human needs rather than convenience alone. JoyLab approaches that question through engineering design by creating a device that is accessible, safe, and responsive to the needs of children with disabilities along with their caregivers. The STS project approaches it differently by demonstrating that when technologies collect and transmit personal data, usability and stylish design do not automatically bring meaningful control and ethical accountability with it. Together, these projects display two sides to the same idea of how engineering is not just about making a system work, but also about a larger topic of carefully deciding who it is for, what assumptions it makes, and what kinds of consequences it creates. In that sense, the technical project demonstrates my ability to build a functioning human-focused device, while the STS project demonstrates my ability to evaluate the social responsibilities that come with designing technologies that shape people’s lives.
