This Lollipop Could Help Blind Women Independently Detect Pregnancy

Sneha Rao, a 27-year-old master’s student in design at Carnegie Mellon University, can trace the inspiration for her invention back to a 2020 article in the Wall Street Journal. In it, Eleanor Southwood, then the chair of the Royal National Institute of Blind People, said, “The dream is to buy any pregnancy test with the knowledge that it’s accessible.” A few years later, Rao came across a Newsweek article that talked about Joanne Hewitson, a blind woman whose TikTok went viral in 2024. As most pregnancy tests available on the market provide visual results, Hewitson has to depend on her sister to read the results for her.

That article, says Rao, touched on something bigger than just pregnancy tests. Followed by extensive research, Rao developed Tact: an edible lollipop that can help blind and low-vision women independently detect pregnancy. The user, if pregnant, will feel raised bumps on both sides of the flat lollipop—a reaction to hCG, a hormone that the body produces during pregnancy.

Recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey reveals that nearly nine million people in the United States live with some kind of vision disability, including blindness. Of the total population living with vision impairment, women and girls account for 4.8 million, or 54 percent—disproportionate to the general population, which is 50.4 percent female.

She explains that users need to be able to check whether the test has expired, understand the instructions and perform the test. Quick fact: The first home pregnancy test Though people with vision impairment can use applications such as Be My Eyes, Seeing A.I. and Aira for visual assistance, they end up losing their privacy and autonomy at such moments. Such applications largely depend on the users providing photos or videos, which are then interpreted with the help of artificial intelligence or human assistance.

In January, under the guidance of Carnegie Mellon biomedical engineering expert Wayne Chung, Rao set out to develop Tact. The master’s student in design for interactions, a field that studies how people interact with products, technology and systems, investigated various approaches. One of the early ideas that Rao considered was a universal reader that could work with standard pregnancy tests already on the market.

It would read the result and convert it into a different format, magnifying the result window, or giving an audio or tactile readout. It was a way to add accessibility without redesigning the test itself. However, the proposed design was eventually rejected on the basis that any technology involved in the process, whether an app, device or server, would create a data trail.