Canan Dağdeviren

The YellowBox is a cleanroom used by Conformable Decoders at the MIT Media Lab, which Dagdeviren designed and constructed from the ground up in 2017. When she was a PhD student, she promised herself that if she ever had the opportunity to build her own space, it would be physically transparent so that anyone passing by would have the ability to observe, take notes, and learn from her without needing any special permissions. This inclusivity is part of what makes YellowBox such a unique scientific environment. Another unique aspect of YellowBox is that it is organized using 5S Methodology. 5S is a system which uses five guiding practices to organize a work space for efficiency and effectiveness: Sort, Set in Order, Shine, Standardize, and Sustain. Essentially, 5S is an organizational methodology that uses visual labels—color-coded based on functionality—to organize spaces and increase safety, identifying potential hazards and procedural information. As a result of this highly organized and efficient system, YellowBox achieved a Green Labs certification by Environmental Health & Safety (EHS) in 2017—the first research lab at the MIT Media Lab to receive this designation since its founding in 1985. Recently, Dagdeviren published an article featured in Advanced Intelligent Systems describing her group's experience with greater efficiency, as a result of the 5S Methodology principles.

In 2014, Dagdeviren and her team developed conformal piezoelectric mechanical energy harvesters, which have been described as "mechanically invisible human dynamos." This project seeks to develop conformal piezoelectric patches integrated into personal garments to extract energy from body movements such as the motion of arms, fingers, and legs. In the future, this work could improve quality life for people and potentially provide environmentally friendly power. Since these energy harvesters are powered by human motion instead of battery power, the need for replacements and high risk/high cost surgical procedures to change depleted batteries could be eliminated.

In 2017, the PZT GI-S project (essentially "a Fitbit for the stomach.") was published. Dagdeviren and fellow collaborators designed an ingestible, flexible piezoelectric device that senses mechanical deformation within the gastric cavity. They demonstrated the capabilities of the sensor in both in vitro and ex vivo simulated gastric models, quantified its key behaviors in the gastrointestinal tract using computational modelling, and validated its functionality in awake and ambulating swine. The proof-of-concept device may lead to the development of ingestible piezoelectric devices that might safely sense mechanical variations and harvest mechanical energy inside the gastrointestinal tract for the diagnosis and treatment of motility disorders, as well as for monitoring ingestion in bariatric applications.

In 2018, Dagdeviren and her team developed an implantable, remotely controllable, miniaturized neural drug delivery system permitting dynamic adjustment of therapy with pinpoint spatial accuracy. Recent advances in medications for neurodegenerative disorders are expanding opportunities for improving the debilitating symptoms suffered by patients. Existing pharmacologic treatments, however, often rely on systemic drug administration, which result in broad drug distribution and consequent increased risk for toxicity. Given that many key neural circuitries have sub–cubic millimeter volumes and cell-specific characteristics, small-volume drug administration into affected brain areas with minimal diffusion and leakage is essential. Dagdeviren and her team demonstrates that this device can chemically modulate local neuronal activity in small-animal (rodent) and large-animal (nonhuman primate) models, while simultaneously allowing the recording of neural activity to enable feedback control.

In 2020, Dagdeviren and her team created a tailored, electronic textile conformable suit (E-TeCS) to perform large-scale, multi-modal physiological (temperature, heart rate, and respiration) sensing in vivo. The rapid advancement of electronic devices and fabrication technologies has further promoted the field of wearables and smart textiles. However, most of the current efforts in textile electronics focus on a single modality and cover a small area. E-TeCS introduces a new platform of modular, conformable (i.e., flexible and stretchable) distributed sensor networks that can be embedded into digitally-knit textiles. This platform can be customized for various forms, sizes and functions using standard, accessible and high-throughput textile manufacturing and garment patterning techniques.

In 2020, Dagdeviren announced the design and pilot testing of an integrated system for decoding facial strains and for predicting facial kinematics, called cFaCES. The system consists of mass-manufacturable, conformable piezoelectric thin films for strain mapping; multiphysics modelling for analysing the nonlinear mechanical interactions between the conformable device and the epidermis; and three-dimensional digital image correlation for reconstructing soft-tissue surfaces under dynamic deformations as well as for informing device design and placement. In healthy individuals and in patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), it is shown that the piezoelectric thin films, coupled with algorithms for the real-time detection and classification of distinct skin-deformation signatures, enable the reliable decoding of facial movements.

In direct response to the pandemic, Dagdeviren's team developed an innovative conformable multimodal sensory face mask (cMaSK) that can be integrated with commercial face masks to monitor signals related to infectious diseases, environmental conditions, and wear status. The thin and conformable geometry of the cMaSK sensing system allows it to be applied to various types of face masks without concerns of deterioration in performance, as shown by mask-fit tests. The cMaSK can monitor critical biological signals such as breathing rates, coughing, skin temperature and mask fit with high accuracy by analyzing signals from air pressure, humidity and temperature. The cMaSK provides a platform for the development of smart face-mask systems that can provide real-time feedback and can actively assist users in optimizing the face mask fit. Dagdeviren's work offers a modular, customizable research tool for studying environmental and health technologies in real-world conditions where human behavior may affect performance, thereby deepening our understanding of mask-wearing behaviors and the resulting human health implications. This research, published on the front page of Nature Electronics in 2022, was conceived, executed and published within a span of one-year, demonstrating Canan's ability to respond and lead a project to completion in a highly competitive manner to critical, time-sensitive research topics.

Ultrasound-induced transdermal drug delivery (sonophoresis) has long lingered in the by-lanes of academic and industrial research, and has failed to attain tangible commercial success. While localized, needleless delivery of drugs is an exciting prospect, the bulky, power-consumptive equipment and long exposure times do not justify the highly-variable, operator-dependent outcomes in the permeability enhancement effects observed in vivo. In 2023, Dagdeviren's team reported a conformable patch (cUSP) with embedded bulk piezoelectric elements to provide short-exposure (10 minutes) ultrasound and effect a 26.2-fold enhancement in niacinamide transport to the dermis. The final system is packaged in a compact form-factor on a flexible polymer substrate that can be applied on facial skin to aid hands-free penetration of popular cosmeceuticals. The ease-of-use and high-repeatability offered by the proposed system provides a game-changing alternative to patients and consumers suffering from skin conditions and premature skin aging. Dagdeviren's latest invention, cUSP, has made the front cover page of Advanced Materials' June issue and was also appeared in Rising Stars series. The Rising Stars series intends to celebrate the diversity of the international scientific communities that these top-tier journals serve by collecting outstanding Research Articles on studies conceptualized and supervised by recognized early career researchers from around the world.

Most recently, Dagdeviren has built up an impressive repertoire of projects in wearable ultrasound technologies, both for sensing and actuation published in Science Advances. Ultrasound modalities have enjoyed a long-standing tradition of being radiation-free, safe and effective on human tissue, but the design, form-factor and cost of ultrasound technologies has not changed from its original hand-held ‘wand-like’ embodiment of the 1970s. Democratizing this technology—making it cheaper, better, more accessible, and ‘wearable’—has the potential to revolutionize the quality and quantity of medical data available for early diagnosis of disease. In particular, it is not feasible for current US transducers to perform accurate image reconstruction over large, curved areas. The human breast presents a particular challenge, as its geometry and deformability are highly variable not only between subjects but also at different times and ages within a given subject. Being at high risk of breast cancer herself, Canan has taken this challenge within her stride to develop a wearable ultrasound technology for longitudinal imaging of breast tissues or lesions both for cancer diagnostic and early detection purposes and to serve as a new non-invasive window into the biological behavior of a breast tumor. With support from the NSF CAREER and 3M Non-Tenured Faculty awards that she received for this work, her goal is to make substantial scientific and leadership contributions to the emerging field of widely deployed biosensing tools, while achieving a broader understanding of soft tissue in a collective and systematic way for improved human health. Dagdeviren's latest research boasts a soft, wearable ultrasound breast patch for early detection of breast cancer, inspired by her late aunt who passed away due to breast cancer. The device enables standardized and reproducible image acquisition over the entire breast with less reliance on operator training and applied transducer compression. A nature-inspired honeycomb-shaped patch combined with a one-dimensional (1D) phased array transducer is guided by an easy-to-operate tracker that provides for large-area, deep tissue scanning and multi-angle breast imaging capability. The results from the device have been cross validated with a commercial ultrasound probe and published in Nature Electronics. The device has the potential to introduce interfaces that enable next-generation features of wearable technologies, such as accurate, autonomous monitoring of soft tissue for 3D imaging, and machine-learning strategies to detect breast tumor progression at competitive costs outside of a clinical setting.

The preliminary results from her research on the breast patch have already garnered valuable traction both within and outside of the academic community. In 2021, Canan was selected for the MIT Future Founders Prize Competition, which is designed to support the top female faculty entrepreneurs at MIT. Dagdeviren became a runner up and received $100K for her invention.

In June 2019, Dagdeviren blended media, art, and science to create an exhibition which was featured in the lobby of the Media Lab for 8 months. The exhibition displayed her students' work, and was titled The Bees of Science. In a blog post, she explained "Like bees, my students work at the intersection of nature, art, and science, drawing on both their experiences in diverse fields of science and engineering and also their diverse cultural backgrounds, much as the bees draw nectar from a host of different flowers. They then apply their minds, hearts, and hands to create unique micro- and nano-scale, mechanically adaptive electromechanical systems for human health monitoring—their scientific "honey."