 Well, right. Well, welcome to another ADHD talk. It's Friday morning at about 11. And today, I am joined by Amanda co who is a chemical engineer who designs wearable devices. So welcome Amanda, I'm going to read a little bit about about you and then you and I are going to have a really fun talk. So Dr. Amanda co completed her PhD in chemical engineering at Renz, Renzler. I don't know how to. It's a layer. Renzlier. So I have trouble remembering how to spell it. Yeah, it's a French word. Polytechnic Institute and her BS is from MIT. The research group focuses on engineering multifunctional materials through intentional design of interfaces current research focuses on materials for soft robotics stretchable electronics, sensing and environmental remediation. She's an assistant professor at the University of Alabama, and she's currently a fellow with the collaborative arts research initiative, Carrie, which is one of the ways that I found her. So welcome, Amanda, to the world of humanities. Digital humanities specifically. And I'm going to go ahead and ask you our first question. So many of us wear devices that help us measure our biometric data. I wear a Fitbit and it definitely helps me stay grounded. It reminds me to get up and move it helps me be aware of my stress level. And it helps me with time management. I very poor with my time management I get some hyper focus and lose track of time sometimes I forget to eat or I forget to go home in the afternoon sometimes. So my Fitbit definitely helps me with those things. And I'm just curious. How did you become interested in designing wearable devices. And what are some of the previous devices that you've worked on or have made. So, real devices are really interesting because I think when you first think of them like you know Fitbit comes to mind. There's even like you know there's t shirts that maybe have some something that comes against your chest maybe it's a response to kind of your temperature. I mean wearable sensors you can even think about like a mood ring right and I respond to the temperature of your body. These are all things that sense something about you something about kind of who you are what how you your current state. The things that are currently out there. I have a lot of challenges. I mean even thinking about kind of. Even in the last few years how well like the iPhone has done and kind of picking up your emotion or how good Fitbits have kind of gone over their lifetime. It's not easy to be good at being a wearable device. You know, maybe there's a motion of just up and down so they can dissect something about kind of changes in and gravitate your gravitational motion essentially. So if we're trying to get kind of more fine tune understanding of your body, particularly things we're thinking about like medical responses or medical devices. Things that can really not just say gross understanding of your body but fine movements, things that can help you biologically things that can help you biochemically things that really have fine understanding of kind of who you are and what how your body moves is something that's still being developed. And what's really exciting when I kind of gotten to, I started doing stuff like this in my postdoc, so I wrote the postdoc with the army research lab. And that's where I kind of gotten to the world of soft robotics and special electronics and things like that. And this idea of using soft materials rather than your Fitbit is made out of copper and you know this hard shell and things like that. But if you wanted something that can detect as you're moving know you're you're stretching you're deforming you need a material that's going to move with you. But how do you kind of get that and still have all the kind of electrical, your computer is all really hard stuff. How do you kind of get the best of both worlds how do you hopefully do both. You kind of have the electrical impulses the ability to sense, but still have material that can move like you are. I mean think of your skin your skill is really good at stretching your skin is really good at moving your skin is good at kind of, as you're going it goes with you. A Fitbit can't do that and iPhone can't do that you know your teacher, at least like the thing that's in. I remember maybe was on college is really big to get these teachers are like your turn turned made sounds or some colors or something based on kind of where you were. You can do that find great understanding and it really takes understanding soft materials, the electronics and the mechanical part pieces of it in order to do that. And there's a lot of really interesting examples kind of that are on the edge of being commercialized you know glucose sensors are a really big thing right now, where they're able to detect things about your body really biochemically and not only detect them but be able to kind of give you a dose of insulin or something like that on its own. So you don't have to take out kind of an insulin shot or things like that is, I got to really do a deep dive into that I got an opportunity to write a book chapter about kind of wearable like biochemical sensors and stuff. There's all kinds of really cool stuff out there and I'll say when I think about wearable I really do think about like a glove or a garment or something like that and I'll talk about that in a second but there's some really interesting wearable stuff and wearable to be like a contact lens could be something that goes on your teeth, and it responds to something in your saliva or responses something kind of in your tears. There's things like you know making bandages that have some sort of sensor in them so they can actually deliver you know drugs or things like that based on the you know the temperature or particular biomolecules that show that something is going wrong. There's a lot of really cool stuff out there. So for me, I, I, I like to know what am I interested in and I want to actually do something useful like I want to do something good for the world not just you know in my lab and just play with toys which is fun, like it's definitely one of the reasons to become an engineer, but I wanted to make sure that we're helping humanity as very miss America. But when I look at kind of being interested in soft materials and these soft electronics, how can we make sensors that conform to the body, understand the body help us understand the body. Particularly what I was interested in is really trying to get kind of the blending of sensitivity and signal. So there's a lot of stuff out there that either. Think of like your if you weigh yourself it's a scale you step on it and tell you how much your way and it's pretty good at you know once you're above a certain weight, it can tell you with some amount of accuracy. So you kind of really, you don't need the like and decimal place. I don't care that I'm some number of point seven seven seven seven seven pounds like that's unusual. There's also people who are working on super super sensitive things. So think about kind of putting, you can take your finger and you can kind of my hand sent to me really dry. So I can put a finger kind of over my my palm, and I can feel every little bump I can feel kind of the texture of my skin things like that. There are there are people who are working on sensors that are really good on that end of it as well. I'm really interested in how do you do both. How do you kind of these gross, these larger kind of measurements, but still get kind of those fine details. One of the reasons that I kind of first started thinking about this is that I was looking at sensors you can put in the soles of your shoes, for example, was something that can detect that you're standing up or how you're walking or things like that. And that exists like there are commercialized versions of that they're usually pretty expensive and they're usually kind of restricted to like occupational therapy or things like that. But they do exist. What I was interested in is how do we kind of use those sensors to not necessarily predict but see as you are getting injured or maybe as you're recovering. And that's kind of that slow descent into something being wrong. And that's not something that's going to be a big change and you know I weigh this much versus this much or you know, I can't stand up versus I can. It can be as you're aging, or maybe as you're recovering from a stroke or something like that, that's small changes and how you're getting better. We're not able to capture that right now because not only does it have to be my whole body measurement, but it has to be those kind of fine changes of if I'm standing. If I'm a healthy person, I should be able to stand with equal balance over both of my feet kind of distributing my weight, and it should be kind of fairly evenly distribute over my feet. How do I tell you know I'm slightly leaning this way or I'm leaning forward or how does that change kind of based on a certain stimuli. That was something that was really interesting to me, in particular, from the game that I did my postdoc with the military. And there's a lot of when you come back to come back to service or think of, you know, being at UA, big thing you come you're back on the field for example you get injured, and you want to get you you want to be back playing or you want to be back on your role kind of as quickly as possible. And it's up to usually occupational therapist or something like that to say whether you're good or not. And first of all that takes a ton of experience. Yeah, not only just kind of your degree but the time you take to kind of learn how to look at that. You're able to get that last, you know, by 10% of you know you're really all the way. Certainly you can tell you know from injured to some amount. But that last five or 10% can still make the difference between whether you have to come back or not you get re injured because you weren't 100% you were 90% or something like that. And maybe for me that doesn't matter because I spend most of my time in the lab or walking around. I'm in the football field and people are smashing into me at real, really big people are smashing really fast that last 10% can matter, or if I'm a soldier in the field and I have to carry enormous amounts of weight. So how do we detect kind of those last bits and last stages of kind of getting better. So one of the things that really interested me at first in terms of wearable sensors and using kind of these soft materials trying to understand kind of the electronics of them. It's funny because I definitely took physics my freshman year college and was like I'm done, never do this again, like, and then nope. Came back and decided to do not just my postdoc but my faculty position that dealing with kind of electronic electronics and em and things like that. And then, so I always kind of interested in how these soft materials can help people. And I say this a lot for kind of all my projects is that I never try to be a solution in search of a problem. I want to make sure that we have kind of what the, what the, what the problem is in mind as we're kind of making our material and making our sensors. And part of Carrie before I actually joined Kerry at there was like a coffee lab. And I was talking to two of these professors, you know, and they said, they were, they were interested in their, they were vocal professors at different departments. And they're interesting basically seeing, you know, they spent a lot of time with their students teaching them how to breathe in a certain way breathing that's appropriate for a singer. And there was all kinds of interesting conversations that we had about what that means, which is something I was not aware of at all. But again, this kind of it was similar to the occupational therapist was that they required a lot of experience. They had to look at the person they had to constantly know this is where you need to be changing this is not expanding your kind of this needs to be, and then so much knowledge of anatomy it was, they were there, they are they still, they're still working with it. They're amazing in kind of what they're doing. There's a lot it was very laborious. And it's also on the student side, you kind of just have to understand what it is the teacher is talking about and you know internalize what it means that you need to expand more versus this versus contract or move or something like that. They were talking to you it's their way to quantify that. And you know, I say particularly as the my generation slash certainly the next generation, I see like a video game like okay I needed to be 10 and if I get 10 that I get the you know the next level or something like that so give me a number, and then I can try to achieve that number and I'll do kind of whatever it needs. So there's something we could do about you know changing your breathing behavior, and this is not kind of how they put it but that big I think about things in terms of numbers and video games and things like that. So give me kind of a number to achieve and then I can figure out what I need to do that. So is there a way to quantify essentially this kind of breathing motion this breathing behavior. So that's kind of led to this, this mixture between kind of the vocal music and and sensing is that if we can put something where if it's a if it's a mechanical movement expansion or contraction, we can measure that we can take our sensors things normally kind of stretchable materials and put it on the body, and how we put it on the body is an interesting question on its own. But basically, how do we detect that you're that your chest is expanding or contracting, or that your posture isn't very good. And maybe those are kind of simpler, simpler ones, you know how much is expanding or contracting all along the torso, all the different pieces of your anatomy on the sides of your body things like that. So I'm going to put these sensors, and hopefully extract numbers of like this is how much. This is where you are now this is how you are maybe we've started. This is the trend that you're making. Maybe you can think about, you know, exercises you did or practices you had that worked practices that didn't, based on kind of you can see where your numbers are changing or not really powerful to be able to quantify how your performance is changing initially. That's how I ended up in this particular project. There's so much kind of wearable stuff that's interesting out there. I think there's a lot of really interesting work now of how do we translate it to be useful. Now a lot of people have made interesting materials and certainly I will continue to make interesting materials, but how do we make it so that, you know, someone in the humanities or someone in music is can use it you know it's not just. There's like a really classic picture of a grad students like finger and a paper where they have like a sensor right here, like look, they can do that and then detect it, which is good, but like that's not getting us anywhere right now. So how do we kind of make that next step. Yeah, oh my goodness, like, as you're talking I'm thinking like all of the spy craft movies that I've ever watched. And I also am thinking a lot about like Octavia butler's xenogenesis series I don't know if you've ever read those but like just the when you like our skin as sensors or our skin is wearable devices or like comparing them to our skin or anatomy like, like, what, what you get to work on is like bringing to life all of this sci fi fiction that we've read all of all, you know, for fun. And I just think that that's just like such a dream job to even be able to know how to do that. You've spoken a little bit about your current project already about the wearable device for breathing. Um, so I guess I want to know more specifically like, what are you hoping to measure. And how does that even work. How are the sensors that you're working on warn and what kind of sensors are they like what does that even mean. You know because you say that like there's a lot of different kinds of sensors so like, what, what are they and what are they measuring and how, how do you put them together in order to correspond with each other and come out with a reading. I'll start kind of the thing that my, my lab are like bread and butter kind of thing is making something called dielectric material dielectric material is part of a capacitor capacitor is one of these kind of fundamental units of a circuit. And I am remembering that physics from em not wasn't my favorite thing in the world, but you know now I'm actually going back to it. So I don't pretend to be an electrical engineer, but the basics. Yeah, for this dirt capacitor and doctor, you have all these sorts of things. So we focus on the capacitor we focus on the dielectric material. The capacitor is really simple. It has a top plate and a bottom plate that are both conductive and something in material that between this dielectric material. You put kind of a field across this the dielectric material. It polarizes you think of kind of pieces molecules in the dielectric material will respond to the field and orient in a certain way. And that's how you can store power. And that's kind of our story electricity. I want to be. I mean you're talking about back to the future at the moment right. I, that's what I'm seeing is the flux capacitor and like story. Pretty sure. I think everyone you say when your kid is gigawatts and it's really gigawatts. It's like, well, who made this decision to like, say it this way. But, yeah. But so we make this material that goes in between the conductor plates essentially and trying to make it polarize better. And there's a lot of materials out there that can do this. There's a lot of ceramic materials that can do this. Ceramics are hard ceramics are rigid. That doesn't really do it for us, you know, if we want to have something that's affordable with the body. So we want to have a polymer polymer being this kind of soft stretching material, but polymers on their own. There's something called permittivity, which is like how good essentially the dielectric material is, and we want the permittivity to be as high as possible. And most polymers are like to maybe they're 3 and there's not you can change the chemistry of the polymer, you know, they're basically this number. There's not a lot you can do to that. What we do is we mix things into the polymer, making a composite to increase that permittivity without having to change anything about the chemistry. And what my what I did with my postdoc and kind of what our power zone is actually using liquid metal. So we use a metal that is liquid at room temperature, going back to the sci-fi think a terminator to the like metal guy that's that's what we're working with. We cannot do that if we could do that. My career, I could just retire now. We were able to basically mix those liquid metal into it and we increase the permittivity we make it more sensitive, we're able to kind of respond to these it feels better. So we take that material and it doesn't have to be liquid metal it can be any kind of other conductive materials things like that, we can basically, again blend the keeping it soft while keeping it kind of electrically interesting and we're very good at doing that understanding kind of the trade offs and tuning those two things. And liquid metal is interesting because how much do you want to use it's fairly expensive so we kind of think about this as a real final application we have always have to think about what our filler is. But we take that we make the dielectric material. And essentially the way you actually make it as a sensor is that capacitance, the kind of what a, what we can read, you know thing like an oh meter or a multi meter kind of things that maybe you're like an electrician can can have, always has their back pocket is based on how thick the material is. So if I have this plate and this plate, even if the material in the middle is the same, this has one capacitance. It has another capacity. Just how about the distances between the two plates. If I take material and I stretch it. It gets thinner by taking material and compress it, it gets thinner. So you can say what the changing capacitance is is directly related to how much it stretched to how much compressed. I'm making me kind of calibration curves we do all kinds of stuff with this material, basically just to say, if you, if you stretch it 20% we know what that number should be, you stretch it 40% we know what that number should be. So if I take going back to the classic kind of grass an example, if I take something kind of put it over my knuckle, I will stretch as I'm moving. And I can say basically how much it had to stretch how much your finger move based on the difference in the capacity. So this is a it's a capacitive pressure, capacitive pressure sensor, capacitive tensile sensor, tensile being stretching pressure being compressing. Does that make sense kind of so far. Oh yeah. Okay, I'm glad. So that's, that's kind of the, the bones of it is that this is it's responding to either compression or tension or something like that, and it either compresses or does something kind of changing that thickness. So, the interesting question that you asked that with how do we actually wear it. Because putting it on the body. I'm not just gluing things. People don't tend to want that. Even, there is actually a lot of work in, I don't know if you've been like EG or EKG or things like that to like nasty wet things you have to put on you and they clip stuff on. I think that's unpleasant. It's also not very robust like it move, you can't do anything while you're doing that. It's gross because you'll have to wash all that stuff off like I've had to do a lot of like heart monitoring and stuff and just go home you like want to take a shower getting all that stuff off of you. So how do we do it where you can get kind of motion and things on the body without having to have kind of that wet connection. So we're actually trying to figure out what the best way is to, what the what the garment so we're going to put on a garment essentially, what does that garment need to look like in order to best move with the body, and what fabric just it's kind of it's very like going back to kind of it started with art and then went to engineering is kind of going back to art as well as how do we kind of make something how do we make a construct a garment that can do that the best. And I actually really like to sew. So I was really excited he actually bought a sewing machine for the lab and we've been using it to make it was like one of my career goals is to build a research sewing machine. But we actually started collaborating or working with someone in our dance costume costume department but she did work on Tiffany Jaeger. She does costumes for ballet, where you know they have to stick with you these people have crazy amounts of movement and they're doing all kinds of stuff. And she's really excited to work with us and say, hey, how do we make something that can be worn on the body and that basically the ideas as I'm breathing, the garment will expand with my breath. And as I'm moving the garment will expand basically that the fabric will move with whatever I'm doing. And the next question like once you have that garment, how do we put the sensors on it, such that the sensors will also move with the fabric. And these are kind of surprisingly different questions. Even just kind of taking your material and taking our dielectric or sensors and putting it on fabric has been an interesting challenge. Our initial material we worked with was a polymer based on silicone. And the most common thing that people will think of silicone is it's a lubricant you know it's really slippery. It means that it's not good to glue things to it. So, it's funny even these kind of like classic is a glue everything does not work. So how do you actually stick that to the fabric we actually had that we've now transitioned to a slightly different polymer different soft material, which kind of just melt into the fabric and your fabric is a weave right and has pores. So if you just kind of melt into it it fills those pores, and we'll kind of stretch with the fabric to some extent it seems like that's been working which is nice. So one really good undergraduate student get Gabrielle Motley, who has he's a Randall scholar so all kinds of good research stuff, and she's been working hard and really trying to figure out how we can put these materials on the fabric. And then as we stretch it doesn't stay actually stretching with the fabric does it not delaminated or kind of like peel off. But she's kind of figure out maybe a system that works with that the fabric I think we're ending up using Tiffany gave us a whole bunch of different fabrics basically different types of spandexes, spandexes, whatever the plural of spandex would be. So everything from this really open weave to like compression sock kind of type of material, and gorilla figure like figure out how to kind of put this on, we think in a fairly robust way. So now she's actually gonna go back and actually try and make the garment. And I think that we're looking at now. And I think maybe because we are a team of largely women women of different sizes women of different backgrounds. It's important even now to kind of start. If you want this to be something that can be useful for people doing any kind of breathing behavior, it should fit everybody. It's not something that's going to fit one body type it's not going to fit you know one height one one. Anything what your body looks like we want to make sure that this is going to be useful for anybody. And it's funny because even on the even on our, I have three undergrads who are working on this with me which they've all been really great and even between them we have very different body types different heights things like that. Jordan and Anthony, Jordan Evans and Anthony Joyce away they get a shout out as well. They've all been trying to keep in mind how do we put this, I don't make it so I'm just like a tube and it only works for one, one person. So we have like black jacket kind of thing where it had it goes over your head and maybe like snaps or has something tied down the side so you can make kind of different height different widths of it. There's a couple of different sizes. The thing is that we're interested in when I talked to kind of to the vocal professors, they were interested in all these kind of different locations on the body, and someone who's you know five one if I put a sensor here, and then someone who's six one I put a sense of here, it's in a different place on their body, and they're not necessarily going to get the same measurement. So how do we kind of figure out on these different sizes. Where do those sensors need to go. So that's kind of the next step in the work is that once we have a garment that does seem to kind of expand and contract and move with the person. What is it. Where do the sensors need to go in order to kind of get all the data that we want. And, I mean, from an academic side, we could just but says there's everywhere, you know, it could just be covered in these types of materials. And maybe that's what we start with first and then kind of take things off as they don't end up being useful. But the hope certainly, I think this is, you know, we're talking about your five year plan, your 10 year plan whatever. I think this is a reasonable you know next five years for this to be a commercially translatable product, which means that we do, we do want to have strategically have placed the sensors kind of where you're going to get the best and most useful information. But that's, that's kind of where this is going. I'll say that. So this was this is inspired partially partially by kind of joining Kerry and kind of talking to people and Kerry. The other piece of this that was really interesting and partially kind of how I tried to justify it to my very not music and art oriented department. Was that if you can take someone who's, you know, a normal healthy student and take that person to a professional level, then can you take someone who's unhealthy someone who's have breathing dysfunction and bring them back to a healthy level. So using kind of the same sorts of methods. So, and that would be hugely beneficial. There's something that you don't need extra drugs for, you know, you don't have to change your biochemistry. It can be something that maybe you could do at home. So, can we develop the device and the techniques so that someone could go home and kind of basically increase their breathing capacity improves their breathing behavior. So that's something we're working on kind of an NIH proposal and out to try and and start doing that as well. But I think understanding kind of this breathing behavior in general and how we can take advantage of what clearly vocal professors have been doing for very, very long time and quantifying that and kind of expanding the utility of that beyond just maybe the vocal profession. So interesting, like I'm thinking about people who have had surgery and have had to be intubated, you know, they always give you that breathing thing where you have to like how this could change like that experience and people with beginning stages of COPD and asthma and just like how many different things there are out there, even recovering from like pneumonia and bronchitis can be so challenging because breathing is such an issue and all of these people that have long COVID and long issues with that like there's just such there's such a diverse demographic of people that this could really improve their quality of life. I just think that's, there's just so much out there. I think that one of my curiosities is, I think when we first talked, you were telling me about, you know, just like the, the specific measures of breathing for singing and breathing for vocal training. And I guess one of my questions is, like, can you talk a little bit about the science of measuring for breathing for, for voice. And how is that different from the way that we normal breathe normally breathe like I understand on a really, really, really broad level that the breathing is different just like my breathing is different if I'm running or I'm going upstairs or things like that. But like, can you describe to us how that breathing is different and why it's been a why breathing for voice would be beneficial as a, as a model or a framework for this. I'll start off saying that I'm definitely not the expert and as I've learned a lot from kind of the vocal collaborators. I think the biggest example I could give you. So I first started talking to him about this project, shortly after my first daughter was born, and they asked now you know how what does it look like when a singer, someone who's a professional singer vocal, vocal professional breath versus you know how I breathe. And it was a very uncomfortable lunch because they started pointing a seed they're doing that and that's how you breathe and they're like, I didn't realize I was breathing wrong the whole time. But they mentioned that if you look at a newborn or an infant the way that they breathe is they, when they're asleep for example, their stomach will go up and down. And then if you look at an adult, your chest goes up and down, and that you're supposed to be breathing with your, with your, your lower abdomen not your upper abdomen that's where you can kind of get the most of your of your breathing, your the best button lung capacity and kind of the best behavior. And somehow, you know, the question of you how do we, how does this help us understand kind of like people in generals, why, when does that happen, how, why does that happen. I mean, they're, I asked them to like, you know, you're socialized to, to breathe with your chest, which I think is something being socialized I think of like, you know, your teacher telling you that you know girls aren't good at math and boys aren't good at being emotional something like that's what I think of being socialized which is not good. I don't remember anyone ever telling me like, you're breathing with your stomach, like that's bad breathe more with your chest. Like, and if I look and now I have two daughters and my, my seven month old definitely breathes with her stomach and my two year old is already breathing with her chest, like something happened. And like, I never said anything no one ever talked about that. Like, how does that happen. And that was my understanding is that basically the vocal. A lot of the vocal training is kind of going back to how you're supposed to be, how you kind of started as a human of you know breathing with with your lower abdomen, if there's more space there you know that it's, you can get more, more air more oxygen more into your lungs by using that part of your anatomy. But if we're breathing we're just always doing it with our chest and then I mean this is under your rib cage there's only so much space up here. So that my being able to figure out, and there's a lot of things like your posture. How do you maximize volume that your lungs can kind of take up, but then there's different parts of you that can handle breath differently. And like, when I talked to a lot of arts and people kind of through carry for example. They're very still focused. I need to talk a lot about the art things and things I don't necessarily understand and I learned a lot from them. It was the first time I went to an art professor and they started taking teaching me a lot more about the science. I was like, oh, you know, way more about anatomy than I ever would have. And they talk about the muscle names and all that. So that's kind of really what I got out of you know how do you, how do you maximize the volume of your lungs essentially. The way to do that is to control your abdomen controls the volume control the space that your lungs take up. And you don't really think about that and if you're hunched over even as you're contracting or if you are you're anything you want to be very over your center you do things that maybe sound kind of like yoga. And being kind of like a lion and things like that. It was really interesting that for whatever reason, I would have thought that we just always start chest breathing because that's easy. I mean I don't know why, but the fact that we start the kind of correct breathing or the breathing that isn't as a most optimal. I'm going to switch out of that. I wonder if you talk about running and walking I wonder if there is something about how, like the, the chemistry or kind of how oxygen transfers. Maybe there's something that's easier about like it's more efficient or something when you have to do it really quickly. That kind of takes advantage of maybe the more chest breathing. I don't know that I've ever seen anyone actually try and study that. I don't know what kind of biochemistry looks like. But is, I mean I literally went to something I went home and my daughter fell asleep and was like, they're correct. Like she is doing the thing that she is better at breathing than I am essentially and she has been around for a few months and I have been around for much longer than that. So that's, that was just wild to me that that was something that really was important for this kind of vocal and all of that. I mean, they had mentioned that they're like had a colleague who had some sort of breathing illness, and was able to overcome it like had something that would have set back you know someone who didn't have this training significantly breathing which would have been a challenge for the rest of their life. And because this person had this training, not only were they able to overcome this setback, but they were still singing professionally. They're still thinking better than I could, and they're still breathing better than I could, even though they had you know parts of their lungs weren't working. And it just seems like such a powerful thing to tap into like yeah I'm glad that you know I love Broadway I'm glad that people can sing like that's great but how tapping that into people who there's so much you have pharmacokinetics and you know people trying to do new drugs and it's always hard and things don't work the way you're supposed to and people don't always take them the way they're supposed to. It was just saying I think of when I say just it's not easy. I mean people come and they major in these things right like there are people whose jobs are to train it so I don't want to minimize that at all, but harnessing that instead of having to change something about your biochemistry just seems such a powerful tool to get people able to breathe more optimally again. I don't know. I just think so much like I know when my kid was really little. He had terrible asthma for like two years his first two or three years and we always had to do like breathing treatments and, you know, lots and lots of albedo, you know, and I remember reading a lot because academics attack their problems and solve their trauma through research a lot of the time. I remember reading a lot about how when you hold your child close to you. Like, there, there is some biofeedback that happens between you and your child and, and there, there had been some studies, I remember about just even like breathing normalizing by being close, you know, being held and being close. And, and I find that really fascinating the idea that we're socializing just by having like contact with our infants. Right. And it doesn't require you to be the biological parent it just requires you to be a human that is close and holding. Right. There are so many other things that happen in our brain development that control our systems through that that biofeedback that we get from being held close. It's fascinating. But, you know, to your point of like how do we learn how to chest breathe, we pass on a bad habit. You know, kind of like, I don't know, myriad other bad habits that we pass on to our kids accidentally. And I guess the study couldn't really be done of like how do you have a kid who's never held never kind of experienced that and then do they continue kind of doing you know belly breathing. Like that's a terrible experiment and that would never pass any RV anywhere. But that is that what it, what would that person be like like what would their breathing capacity, what would their athletic capacity your vocal capacity be if they've never got that kind of that feedback. You think of all the things that you try to do they're good for your kids you know holding them close like well, even that like right like I can't do anything right as a parent. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. I mean there's just so much that this leads into my last question, which is a very humanities based question we've got. You know the humanities conversations. They're very different from science conversations sometimes although they, they are often on scientific topics, humanities, folks really like to take like the science and ask the big picture questions about them about how, how does this make us human or how does this apply to being human or, you know, how does this impact us right. Any number of questions that Donna what Donna Haraway asks applied to your work. So, I have the question. I'm intrigued by the idea of considering wearable devices as a humanistic pursuit. Something that allows us to develop a relationship with our bodies and to understand ourselves on a new level. How do you think a wearable device changes our perception of what it means to be human, or to know ourselves as human, and what kinds of impacts do you think devices have had. And what kinds of ideas do you have for the future impact of where wearable devices on our understanding of what it is to be human. But the big question is that you know I like the big question. Yeah, I mean I think that one, one take on that and I don't know if this is really getting at what you're what you're asking. But I think that, especially with all the AI in the news right now and we think of when we think of robots and science fiction. There's AI which is the computers and just kind of exist in the ether robots or maybe this physical manifestation of that. But certainly when you look at sci fi the next step closer to humans is the biotic people right you know people who have replaced their legs or arms or limbs or organs or something with with robotic parts. But if we get to the point of kind of wearable sensors where you are. Like, can you just be broken down to a series of numbers, like in your, like your, your movement, your, I mean certainly the type of things I do or our movement and position and things like that but you know everything about you know your biochemistry and your, your, if you, if you can be put into a computer, just like a running set of numbers, like what does that actually mean, like how that, like that's that file is you have a file with you yesterday I can track all of your movement. I can track all of your brain signals, I can track kind of your eye movement I can track kind of your electrical impulses I can, like, that's, we're getting certainly getting to the point where we can really quantify using kind of wearable and I'll say implantable devices as well, kind of really quantify a lot of kind of just who you are. But then what does that mean to be who you are right and just the electrical impulses doesn't say we were certainly not there like what are you thinking. There's all kinds of interesting stuff now of being, and if you've seen these kind of wearable sensors you can you can wear them and based on your brain impulses you can control, like the movement of things. They're actually at the museum in Huntsville they have an example of this where you can kind of play is like a toy version of it. And certainly it's not perfect and there's a there's a professor at UA who's working on doing something like this. But, like, we can do really good job of at least picking up these signals. So, like, where we're really kind of blur is that line between you know there's like there's human and there's robot like if you can be numbers if we can just say you are a series of numbers. But you're not right and you're you say yeah. And science and engineering is much easier deal with the series and you were a series of numbers we could, we could cure everything like we could treat everything everything would be would be perfect and you're not. It's really one of the things that comes up a lot in research is I can I teach health and safety. And then there's the fluid mechanics and all the reactor design and all that and everything works perfectly and then you put a person into it and everything falls apart. People are always going to be kind of this really different animal, but sensors are kind of really just more and more kind of quantity in the breathing right is quantifying something that previously was something that really had to be experienced. And I think that's that's really interesting. And I suppose also, there's the aid aspect of a lot of these sensors. So it's not just what your status is but what can we do to kind of change that status. So the glucose monitor is a really good example of like you can register your glucose and we can basically just immediately give you insulin. But there are also examples and maybe I always go back to our robots, is that if I, if I'm wearing a sensor, and I can tell that I'm standing and I want to jump. And it is trained that when I put this amount of force onto the sensor is going to give me feedback of twice that amount of force, so I can jump higher, I can run faster, I can be stronger. Ironman is in the future, but it is not inconceivable to have kind of these devices that can tell basically what you're trying to do and amplify that. Right. That's just kind of kind of nuts and whether it's military or athletics or things like that. And it all really comes down to sensors, because if you are working on a with a group or on a project now that's trying to look at kind of like constructed construction workers, where there's a lot of labor, really labor intensive tasks that you have to pick something up. It goes along with nurses as well where you might have these kind of smaller people who still need to pick up. And it says you need to be able to move them off the bed or whatever and be really useful to kind of give that person that basically extra strict beyond what they could normally do. But there are devices that try to do that now and because they can't sense where you are and kind of what your force is now, they tend to give too much, or they give it in the wrong direction and ends up hurting you or kind of making you extra tired. So these sensors are really going to enable all these kind of additive and kind of things on top of what you can normally do. She's really cool and really exciting. But then, you know, kind of where is the line maybe somewhere there are are you numbers where where is the human to the bionic to robot kind of thing and I guess the other piece of that also is what does the sensors mean to be human. But when we make a lot of these sensors doing them in a vacuum we're really oftentimes trying to mimic what the body can do. Like when skit that your skin, your nose is an amazing biosensor we can't make anything nearly as good as your nose. So when you're picking things up and your tongue is a sensor your skin is sensor your hands and your feet. Everything we're doing is really trying to just get as good as we are. But then we take the sensors and we put them on robot. Not only kind of putting sensors on us and kind of making us a lot until kind of numbers and data, we're trying to get robots to be more like us. We're trying to get that kind of skin that can respond to and understand the environment that can balance itself better because it has sensors on the bottom of kind of the feet and we can make, you know, just go into kind of animals birds that can sense air better robots that can sense air better like birds so that they can use less power and we're really trying to use these sensors not just to kind of quantify us but to make robots more like us. I think that's an interesting question maybe as well as you know, again, learning that line of human robot. Sensor, you know, it's an interesting world. Yeah, I mean it's age old right we've got, we've got stories and stories and stories about the, you know, the, the blurred line between humans and cyborgs and humans. We've been watching Dr who with with our nine year old and, you know, the whole cyborg storyline or sub subplot comes to mind where you have, you know, all of the human intellect with all of the emotion stripped out of it. And is that still human like if you remove the emotion out of it is it still human and I think those are really fascinating questions to ask when we, when we have these because obviously the devices that you're working on have nothing to do with altering the emotions but but certainly they can monitor and leverage emotional response right and it makes me think of the Android stream of electric sheets and that kind of software. If they if they, it walks like a duck and talks like a duck you know, at some point is it just a duck. Yeah, yeah. We're not there yet and I don't think my, I don't know what the timeline is but definitely science is moving in that direction for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I have a sister who's a paramedic and she certainly could use some of that, you know, extra strength she she has to, she has a similar build to mine and you know, lifting stretchers and people, especially people who are you know paramedics and nurses and did not going to say, Oh, you're big and I am small so I can't pick you up like they're going to do it anyway. But then, you know, nurses have horrible back problems and things like that and how can we take these people who are putting their bodies on the line and make things better for them. Absolutely. It's so much fun Amanda. I just want to talk forever. But we're coming to time. And I was wondering if you have any questions for me as we wrap this conversation up. I think in talking to you I think I've better gotten a better understanding of what humanities means I suppose that I feel like humanities was a class that took a junior high that really meant English and social studies. Yeah, what is what is humanities what is digital humanities I appreciate kind of getting the chance to me again this last question of what what does it mean to be human I think I don't think about stuff like that very often and but I do read a lot of science fiction which I think does often ask, you know, what does it mean to be human. Yeah, I have a question but I think you've given me a lot to think about kind of just. Yeah, I have, I have a lot more that I want to chat with you about informally not being recorded. But as far as just like the crossover between those things like, because I read a lot of science fiction too and I read a lot of like post human theory and, you know, just the fun questions of like where are, where are the lines between human and not human. Like, how do we define that from like post structuralist ideas like when you pull things apart and really start trying to categorize them like how you how can you find a stable category that is that is human and what does that mean. Right, so yeah. More conversations to come but I just appreciate your time so much this has been so lovely and I think so many people are going to enjoy listening to your talk today and just thinking about all of these things especially, you know, a lot of humanities folks are super. Super curious when we start hearing scientists talk about stuff like this so thank you for for offering your time to feed us with some fun ideas. Great well thank you so much for talking to me as well. Yeah. So we're going to go ahead and wrap this up. And this has been great. And I'm going to stop recording.