Angela's TEDTalk Reflection

This TEDTalk, given by Kenneth Shinozuka who’s still only a teen like the rest of us in CIS112, is about how wandering of Alzheimer’s patients can be a big problem and his invention of smart socks as a solution. These smart socks are designed to send an alert to a caregiver if a patient gets out of bed and the design won him the $50,000 Scientific American Science in Action Award in 2014 as well as being a 2014 Davidson Fellow.

Kenneth start off his Ted Talk by getting your attention with the jaw dropping fact that cancer and diabetes aren’t actually the biggest threats to Americans’ health even though that’s what most people would think. The largest threat is actually Alzheimer’s and every 67 seconds someone in the United develops the disease. In fact, the number of Alzheimer’s patients is said to triple by the year 2050 and around 65% of these patients wander.

After these facts to bolster his introduction, Kenneth goes on to build up his ethos by telling the audience that he grew up in a house with three generations including his grandfather who has Alzheimer’s. He tells us how wandering was a problem for his grandfather, which ended up affecting his own aunt’s health as she was his primary caregiver and had to stay up to make sure his grandfather didn’t wander out of bed. This is what triggered Kenneth’s idea to create smart socks with pressure sensors that could relieve some of the stress on his aunt and other caregivers. He then gives a demonstration and brief depiction of the invention.

Throughout this speech, Kenneth maintains extremely good eye contact and never stutters of uses any filler words so you know that he either really knew what he was talking about or had practiced a ton. However, a lot of his speech is technical as he’s explaining how he created the device and as the camera pans out to the audience, you can see lots of confused or just bored faces. Due to this, I think that his speech could have been slightly improved by reducing the technicality of his explanation so that everyone in the audience would understand it. He also didn’t use very many different facial expressions during the speech since for the most part his face was just neutral. I think that if he’d varied them a bit more, he could have engaged his audience better.