Making emotional context easier to access.

The Beginning

CueLens began with a story I will never forget: the story of Anish, an autistic college graduate. While hanging out with friends, he understood their teasing as friendly banter. When the tone shifted and they grew frustrated, that escalation was not clear to him. One of them punched him in the face.

That moment stayed with me because the harm came from a breakdown in shared context. Anish did not lack empathy; he did not have reliable access to the social cues others assumed were obvious. That realization became the spark for CueLens.

Emotion-Detecting Glasses

My first prototype was inspired by the Stanford Autism Glass Project. I built emotion-detecting glasses that used a small camera to identify facial expressions in real time and relay the detected emotion through headphones, effectively creating "emotional subtitles" for the world around you.

It was a scrappy build, but it proved the concept: technology could provide extra context at the exact moment communication becomes harder to interpret.

Startup Prep School

I applied to Santa Clara University's Startup Prep School and became the first high school student ever accepted into the accelerator. There, I learned how to turn an idea into a scalable venture.

I conducted and organized over 50 interviews with autistic people, psychologists, professors, and entrepreneurs. Listening to their stories shaped how CueLens could be more useful, respectful, and accountable.

National Recognition

At the end of the program, our team competed in a national pitch competition. Against college founders from across the country, we won $500. That moment validated that the problem we were solving mattered.

Redefining CueLens

By the end of the accelerator, I reimagined CueLens as an app that adds context for facial expressions during video calls, supporting digital communication with emotional subtitles.

Over the summer, I worked with Mirro.ai to refine the model and deepen my understanding of expression-aware AI and ethical dataset design.

Global Collaboration

In the months since, I have been collaborating with families, therapists, and autism centers across three countries to make CueLens multilingual and culturally inclusive.

Emotions, and how people express them, look different across language and culture. Accessible AI should be designed with that diversity in mind.

CueLens continues to grow with that mission: to make social context easier to access across neurotypes, languages, and cultures.