Not too many 17-year-olds get labeled as game-changers.
But then, there aren’t many teens like Catherine Wong.
In March, the Morristown High School senior will compete for a $100,000 top prize as one of 40 finalists in the Intel Science Talent Search 2013. The real winners, however, could be underprivileged people around the world.
Cathy has tweaked an electrocardiogram machine and stethoscope to interact with cheap mobile phones used in developing countries. She believes this technology will enable doctors to remotely diagnose conditions in nearly 2 billion people without access to quality health care.
“That’s going to be a really empowering thing,” Cathy said.
Dr. Eric Topol of the Scripps Research Institute in California agrees. Cathy’s project, dubbed “Design and Evaluation of a Cell-Phone Compatibly Wireless Electrocardiograph,” is “the kind of technology that ‘flattens the earth’ for better medical care,” the cardiologist said in a statement.
Serious stuff, for a kid who doesn’t take herself too seriously. Teachers describe Cathy–who juggles, designs paper airplanes and loves brightly striped, mismatched socks– as a delight to work with.
“She’s really easy to coach. You just point her in the right direction and she goes,” said physics teacher Anthony Danese.
Which may help to explain Cathy’s perfect SAT score. And it looks like she has inherited the medical gene: Her dad is a radiation oncologist and her mom is a former dentist.
Cathy’s project, which edged out nearly 1,700 other entries to make the Intel finals, began with a freshman field trip to the Cooper Union Design Museum. The exhibit was called “Design for the Other 90 Percent.”
“What the message of that museum exhibit was, was that so much of our engineering today is focused at a tiny sliver of the population, and our goal is to just make shiny gadgets for people who already have so much. We have so much engineering power out there, and so much technology… If engineering is supposed to be a field that’s about impact and application, that’s where it’s going to have the most impact–in designing for the developing world,” said Cathy, who holds a provisional patent on her diagnostic system.
She has presented her technology at Google headquarters and a TEDx conference, and spent part of a summer doing research at MIT. She has applied for admission there, and at Stanford. Harvard already said yes.
If she wins Intel’s $100,000 prize, Cathy said she plans to donate some of it to research agencies. She also intends to keep refining her invention.
“I’d really like to take this project further. The concept of remote telemedicine, which is using mobile phones to connect patients, especially in impoverished areas, is something we’re seeing enormous amounts of growth in recently. And so I’d really like to see just how many diagnostic tools can be made and adapted for the mobile phone platform. I’d like to take the cost of everything down as low as possible.”
That would involve adapting features already inside the phones, rather than adding external devices, she said.
Cathy’s teachers light up when asked about her.
“She wants to give back to the world, and those are awesome qualities for a student to have,” said science teacher Erin Colfax. “She’s committed to things that are important in life.”
Christopher Duvall, science supervisor at MHS, said Cathy sets the bar high for the school’s Science Academy.
“It’s going to be very interesting to see how large of an effect she has in terms of changing the world as we know it,” he said. “Because she has the potential to utilize technology in such a way that society itself will change.”
