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Caitlin Little writes reminders on adhesive notes of things she has to do or wants to remember.
was inspired by Caitlin Little, a teenager with anterograde amnesia who’ s unable to retain new memories for more than a minute at a time; and Music: Not Impossible was inspired by a gathering of young deaf people at a concert led by a deaf DJ whom Ebeling saw in an online video.
“ They were standing close to the speakers receiving the vibrations from the music and I had an aha moment,” he says.“ A friend of mine suffered a head injury and lost his sense of smell. I realized you don’ t smell with your nose, you smell with your brain. That made me realize you don’ t hear with your ears, you hear with your brain. I figured there might be a way to create a music experience for the deaf through touch signals that the brain processed— a wearable technology that imparted a wide range of frequencies, and even melodic sweeps and swoons, to the user’ s skin.”
MEMORY: NOT IMPOSSIBLE Ultimate Software, a provider of cloud-based human capital management systems, funded much of the research behind Memory: Not Impossible, the project involving people with memory impairments, although Ebeling believes the solution can eventually assist people with cognitive declines like Alzheimer’ s disease and dementia.“ Caitlin is an extreme circumstance and if we can make it work for her, we can make it work for anyone,” he says. Among the project’ s team members is Silicon Valley engineer Prashant Marathay, a program manager who served stints at Alphabet, Apple, and Intel before founding his
PHOTO BY MAGGIE STEBER / VII / REDUX
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