QuickBooks Online. Credit Memo, Bad Debt, Sales Returns. Get ready to start moving on up with QuickBooks Online. We're going to be using the free QuickBooks Online Test Drives, searching in our search engine for QuickBooks Online. Test Drive, choosing the option that has Intuit.com in the URL, Intuit being the owner of QuickBooks. We will be using the United States version of the QuickBooks Online and verifying that we're not a robot. Zooming in by holding down control up on the scroll wheel currently at 1-5% on the zoom in. Noting on the car dropdown that we're in the accountant view as opposed to the business view. We will be toggling back and forth between the two views so you can get a look at both of them. Duplicating some tabs up top to put reports in as we do every time. Right-clicking on the tab. Duplicating it. Right-clicking on the duplicated tab. Duplicating it again. Let's go back to the tab in the middle. Go to the reports on the left-hand side and open up the balance sheet report. As that's thinking, tab to the right and go to the reports on the left-hand side. Open up the profit and loss report. Close up the hamburger. Scrolling up to the top. Changing the ranging. This is the date range from 010122 tab to 123122. That's January 2022 to December 31, 2022. Run it. Refresh it. Update it. Tab to the left. We're going to close the hamburger. Scroll up. Same range up top from 010122 tab to 123122 tab. Run the report. Refresh it. Update it. That's the setup process we do every time. Support accounting instruction by clicking the link below giving you a free month membership to all of the content on our website broken out by category. Each course then organized in a logical, reasonable fashion making it much more easy to find what you need than can be done on a YouTube page. We also include added resources such as Excel practice problems, PDF files, and more like QuickBooks backup files when applicable. So once again click the link below for a free month membership to our website and all the content on it. Back to the tab to the left. We're opening up the new button. We've been focusing in on the customer cycle, which represents the cycle where we expect generally to get money into our checking account at the end of the cycle. There's a couple different ways the cycle might work depending on the industry we are in. The easiest kind of customer cycle would be one in which you get in gig work or something, you're getting paid from YouTube, from Amazon or something like that, and you just record the deposit when it clears the bank possibly with the bank feeds. The second easiest process would be that if you have a cash register, you're on a cash-based system, but you can't wait till something clears the bank, you've got to record the sale at the point of time it takes place even though you're receiving money at the same time you do the work such as in a restaurant, a sales receipt form, for example, and then we're going to make the deposit, and then the full accrual process would be we make an invoice because we did the work first, invoicing the client for the work that we did, increasing the accounts receivable, tracking that, and then hopefully receiving money for that outstanding accounts receivable, and then depositing that money into the bank. Now, we could have a glitch in the system of some kind, in which case there's a problem, the customer complains. We have faulty merchandise or something like that, something went wrong, in which case we would have to in essence reverse the sale. That in essence is going to be the credit memo. And many of these items down here will go into some of these, the refund receipt, the delayed credit, the delayed charge. We'll hopefully talk about them as well, but let's first just do the standard item if there's a reversal of the transaction, which is going to be the credit memo. Now to understand this, you've got to first think about the sales transaction and then reverse the sales transaction. So if you're thinking about what accounts are going to be impacted, you want to first think about the normal accounts that are impacted, and then reverse that. So let's just look at a flow chart and just to understand this from a flow chart perspective, this is the desktop flow chart, but I'm just giving an idea of the normal flow if we're going to be invoicing a customer for the work that we did. We did work, we invoice the customer. We received the payment then and then we typically make the deposit. Now, if at the point we invoice, there's a problem before we get paid and we say, okay customer, you're right. There's a problem. Let's just reverse, you know, the sale. Then we would enter a credit memo basically right here in the transaction, meaning we're not going to receive the payment. We're going to not delete the invoice because that's we still want the audit trail. We're going to create a credit memo which will in essence reverse the invoice, but we'll still see what happens. I'll still be able to look in the customer detail and say, yes, we created an invoice and then we made a credit memo for whatever reason. Do we want to do business with this person in the future or what not going forward? It's better to know the audit trail rather than, you know, delete the invoice, but that will basically bring the accounts receivable back down to zero. That's where our focus will be here. Now you could have a situation where they already paid you on the invoice or you made a sale at the cash register and then they come back and say, hey, there's an issue with this and they want to return or get their money back at that point. Well, at that point, you can't just reverse the accounts receivable. They've already paid you. So you might have to issue them, you know, the money back, which would be a transaction of decreasing the checking account. So our major focus will be here, the increase of the invoice or the entering of the invoice and then basically reversing it with a credit memo. Okay. So to think about that, let's go back on over and let's actually make an invoice. I'm going to go here. I'm going to create an invoice and I'm just going to do our standard thing. I'm going to make it for AA again. So this is just be a generic customer that we're going to be putting together that will show up on top of the customer list. I'm not going to add an email terms net 30 so they're going to pay us in 30 days. The date 12 31 22. It's going to be doing 30 days one 22 23. And then let's put an item down here, which I'm going to make an inventory item because that's the one that carries the most problems with the recording of the transaction and the reversal because that adds a lot of complication to the invoice. Now, if it wasn't inventory and it was just a service item and we don't have sales tax related to it, it would be that much easier and there would be a less complicated transaction. So we'll just do the more complex transaction. And then you can you can see what would happen on the less complex transaction by just subtracting out the inventory component.  I'm going to call it inventory one inventory one tab tab tab tab quantity on hand. I'm going to just put 10 on hand. And so this will record a transaction to put the inventory on hand so that we can then sell it, which we're doing here with the invoice. As of the beginning of the month, I'll say reorder point is zero. The inventory asset account, that's what's going to be increasing when we buy the inventory. It's going to increase by these 10 units times the cost when we put this on place. But the invoice that we're going to record will decrease the inventory asset account. And then we're going to say it's going to be a description. Let's say the sales price is just let's just say it's $1,000 to make an even number. The income account will be sales of products. That's what will happen when we record the invoice. And let's say that it's a taxable item. So that looks good. It should apply the tax purchasing description will be inventory one. Let's say we buy them for $750 and the cost of goods sold will be recorded when we create the invoice on the income statement, the expense of us consuming the inventory for purchase for the sale of it. So then we're going to say save it and close it. So now we've got our inventory items. So we've got $1,000. We'll just sell one of them and the taxes is checked off here. So what is this going to do? It's going to be a invoice. So it's going to increase accounts receivable for the full amount, including the sales tax. The other side is going to go to the revenue driven by the item. That's what's telling it which account to go to for $1,000. What we charged the sales tax is going to go to a payable account, basically sales tax payable and inventory is going to go down, not by the 1,000, but by the 750, which isn't on the form, but known by the system due to the inventory item being used and cost of goods sold is going to be going up net impact on net income, 1,000 minus 750. And we're also going to have an impact on the sub ledger for customer. That's going to owe us the $1,000. And we're going to have an impact on the sub ledger for the inventory account by unit tracking the unit of inventory that we sold as well. So a lot going on with the invoice. When we issue the credit memo, we're going to have to reverse that entirely. So we'll talk about that in a second. Let's just verify this first. See if we're right in what this is doing. Let's save and close this. And then go to the, to the forms and run it. I'm going to hold control, scroll up a bit and we've got the AR should have going up. So now I'm going to drill back down from the source document just to verify that this is doing what we thought it should do. And let's scroll back down. There's the, the AA, there's the 1,080. So it went up by the full amount as we would expect, including the sales tax. So it includes the sales tax closing that out, scrolling back up, back to our balance sheet, going to the tab to the right. And then we're going to refresh this one. And this went into the income account for products and service income. So we'll go into that just to verify. There it is. It went up by the 1,000, not by the full 1,080. It did not include sales tax. In other words, the sales tax, if I go back here is back on the balance sheet. And it should have increased the liability account of here. The, I think it's the board of equalization. That's who we pay the sales tax to. So we owe them their tax that they made us collect for them $80. Okay. So then we're going to go back on over and back again. Also the inventory up top is impacted an asset account on the balance sheet. So we're on the balance sheet, asset account inventory, zooming into it and scrolling down. So it was impacted by 750 and amount that's not on the invoice, but known by the system by the item that we created. And then back and one more time. If I go back to the, to the income statement cost of goods sold is impacted as well. Going into the cost of goods sold. There is, hold on a second. What happened there? K-PASO 750. There's the 750, the cost of us using the inventory in order to generate revenue. So now we've got the impact on the income statement was the revenue 1000 minus the cost that gets sold 750, the impact on gross profit and net income. So then we can also say that there should be a sub ledger for the accounts receivable. So the balance sheet accounts receivable sub ledger for AR by customer. So let's look at that because we're going to have to reverse this whole thing with the credit memo. So I'm going to duplicate this tab and notice again, if you're going to reverse something, the best way to look at it is to, is to first think about how the original thing was recorded and then reverse it, not trying to construct the reverse transaction, the credit memo in your mind first, right? It's easier to construct something that's a normal business transaction and then reverse it. So then we're going to go and save reports on the left hand side and then scroll down. Who owes you money? Let's take a look at the customer balance detail report, let's say, and we'll show all dates. Okay. And then there's the invoice. There's the invoice here. The point being that this is broken out by customer now instead of just by date. And it ties out that 636152 to what is on the balance sheet, the 636152. And the inventory has a sub ledger because we're tracking it on a perpetual inventory method. So let's look at that sub ledger going to the tab to the right, right clicking on it, duplicating it. And then we're going to go into the reports on the left hand side.  I'm just going to type it in inventory, inventory valuation summary. And here we've got the nine units. We should run it for 1231, 123122. Run it. I was running. So here's the 750. So we had nine units we put on the books when we added it for the beginning balances and then we sold one. So the point is the total down here adds up to 734625. And we have a sub ledger telling us the units and the types of inventories we have that 734625 should tie out to the balance sheet over here. So a lot going on with that invoice. Let's see what happens on the customer side. Let's imagine the customer comes in and says, Hey, something's wrong. I want to reverse this. I want to return the inventory or whatever. So now we would go, okay, let's go into their on this side onto the sales area, which you could call the customer center sales cycle revenue cycle. And we could look at it by invoice here to pull up the invoices and say it has not yet been paid or I let's start with all transactions. I could go to all transactions and I can do my sorting up top for the open invoices and say, Okay, there's open invoices that have not yet been paid. I see it right there. I can also sort my invoices this way open overdue and so on this way. I could find it in my invoices tab up top and be searching in essence for the, the, there's the overdue invoices, not due invoices and the, and this would be the category we're in. So let's go ahead and change the date. So, so there's our a a a right there, or we most likely if the customer came in would search under their customer tab, and then we still could sort by the open invoices, which is kind of neat. Or we'd probably just clear everything and find a a a. Okay. Who are you a a a. Okay. So there we see the, the invoice that we're expecting to receive payment on, but no, they're saying that they're not going to pay us because they're kind of return the merchandise. So now we're going to say, all right, so I'm going to make a credit memo with it. So what I'd like to do from just a journal entry standpoint, I'm going to, I'm going to duplicate this tab, right click and duplicate this tab. And I would typically say, okay, what I'm going to do is create a credit memo, which basically mirrors this invoice. So if I open up this invoice, for example, I could then pull this on a on a separate screen, right. And then use it to populate the credit memo, which, which would just mirror, which would look just like the invoice, except it would be the mirror opposite, the reversal. But you kind of want to understand what the invoice is doing because you might want to tweak the credit memo a little. So in other words, if I was going to start the credit memo, I can go back on over here and say, okay, let's hit the plus button up top. And now I'm going to make a credit memo because they these people aren't happy and they want to reverse the sale. And I don't want to, I don't want them to give me a bad Yelp review or something on the internet. So we're going to say I have enough problems. People yelling at me over there all the time. I didn't do anything. I swear. Any case, we're going to say 1223. They want to reverse it or they're going to give me a bad Yelp review, whatever. So now we're going to say this is going to be inventory. We're just going to mirror what we did inventory. And there's inventory one. And so the whole thing is mirrored. It looks just like the invoice, except it's a credit memo. And this will reverse it exactly. And then we're also, once it's been reversed, you might say, well, it's got to be connected to the invoice or the invoice is still going to be open. Then we can, it'll do it generally automatically. But if it doesn't do it automatically, then we can kind of connect it with the, with the receive payment form. So we'll, we'll take a look at how that works. But notice if this reverses it automatically, we still might have an issue because it's going to actually reverse the income line item. So I'm going to get in the weeds a little bit on the transaction and see if we want to kind of tweak this a bit. So first I would think about, okay, what did the invoice do? I'm just going to write this out in a journal entry and then reverse it. This might be going too far, but I think it's kind of useful for some, a lot of people, right? So we're going to say, what happened when we did the invoice? Well, accounts receivable went up. The accounts receivable went up by 1,080, including the sales tax.  This is a credit. I'm going to put the credits on the left hands on the right. And then I'm going to say it went up by negative. I'm going to make them negative, which also represents a credit to me a thousand.  And then we also had the cost of goods sold, which was for $750. And the inventory went down. If I misspell any of this, I apologize. That's the transaction that really took place. I'm going to pull this up to the top of my worksheet for some reason. I'm down there. And then I'm going to close this up. So if I reverse this, the easiest thing to do, I'm not going to try to say, just if I'm thinking about this in my mind, I'm not going to try to like put the debits on top or anything. I'm just going to write the same thing and reverse it. What's the credit memo going to do? Well, I'm just going to take the same thing and just reverse the whole thing if I'm doing it in debits and credits. I'm just going to say, all right, well, that means AR is going to be credited. It's going to go back down and the sales is going to be debited. The sales tax is going to be debited. The cost of goods sold is going to be credited. And the inventory is going to be debited. It's going to be the reverse. If you look at this from a debit and credit standpoint or just an increase and decrease standpoint, it should look funny because you don't normally do this. It's backwards, right? That's why you want to think about this first, what happens in the end, and then this. Now, this is fine. Like the accounts receivable going down. Yeah, of course, that's what we want to happen. But the sales going down, that's weird because normally we only like sales going up, right? So the fact that it's going down, sometimes we might want to record this into instead like a sales returns and allowances account or maybe like a bad debt account instead of decreasing sales. So that's where the issue comes in. The sales tax payable going down. That's good that we need that to happen because the sale didn't really happen and it might go down in a future period. So we're not going to go and fix the prior period and undo what we did last time. We're not going to delete the invoice because the sales tax would get messed up and we might have already paid it or something. We're going to reverse the sales tax with a credit memo this way, which will fix it in the future and then we'll go forward from there. The cost of goods sold. The cost of goods sold looks funny because cost of goods sold being an expense account usually only goes up and now we're reversing it. But that's typically what we do. So every once in a while cost of goods sold goes down if there's like a reversal here and we're going to say, okay, that's fine. And then the inventory, if we got the inventory, it's going to go back up. Now this is another issue because did I get the inventory back? Is the inventory broken? Was that the problem? Did we get a return of inventory or not? So the question here is, do I record this side of the transaction or not? Or is the inventory not a functioning matter? If I'm going to get the inventory back and use it as inventory, then you would think I'd have this reversal. So let's reverse it exactly and then talk about specifically how we might fix kind of this item. So let's go back on over and say, okay, I'm just going to record the reversal like this and it should reverse. Let's do this in the next period actually. Let's do it on 010123 so that we can see it the month after and it'll be in its own place. So I'm going to say save and close. So there we have it. So now what we have is the credit memo and notice what it did. It created a payment area. We didn't have to connect it because you might then say, what about this original invoice? If I go into this invoice now, it says it's paid, but I didn't get paid. I made a credit memo and then the system made this payment form. It basically see how it says created by QuickBooks Online. So in order to connect the credit memo to the invoice to show the invoice having been paid, QuickBooks did it automatically making this payment item. And the payment item is usually the next step we do with an invoice. You have an invoice and then we've received the payment. So we would say AAA. We normally click off that we've received a payment, but there's no received payment amount. Why? Because down below we have this credits item that we matched out to the credit. So QuickBooks did that automatically, but that link is important. Otherwise, you would have an open invoice still and the invoice and then the credit memo not linked to anything. So QuickBooks kind of makes that connection generally for us, but it's useful to know that that's payment thing has been generated right there and is a linking step within the process. Okay, let's see what happened by going to the balance sheet and let's run it. We got to change the date because I did it in the next period. So let's go from 010123 to 123123 and run it. And so now we're going to say that there was a decrease to the accounts receivable. So if I go into the accounts receivable, there's the decrease. It's reversed exactly. You know, if I change this to the prior period to 22 and run it and scroll down to the bottom. So now we've got it reversed out exactly, right? And then I'm scrolling back up top. And then if I go to the income statement on the right and we run that for 010123 to 123123, run it. We now have a thousand dollars in the sales. Once again, it reversed it exactly because if I take this back to 2022 and run it, you can see here that 1000 got reversed with the credit memo back. The other sides on the sales returns. So sales returns back to the balance sheet. I'm sorry, the sales tax payable. So it's in the board of the equalization going into that. So there's that reversal. If I change the date again to 2022, boom, run it. So now we have that got reversed out and it happened in the next month. So even if I paid the sales tax in the prior month, it's going to reverse out in the following month. If that didn't happen and I already paid the sales tax, then it's going to get all messy. So then we're going to say the next item is inventory. So inventory up top. We have inventory being reversed, meaning it went up, which again, is the inventory actually worse something anymore? Or is that the reason they returned it? Because it's worthless. That's why they want to give me a bad Yelp review. I'll take it back. I'll reverse it. I'll reverse it. Just don't harm me on the interwebs. And then if we go back to the income statement, we then have the 750 cost of goods sold right there on this side. So we've got the 1000 and the 750 on the reversal. So it reversed it exactly like we would expect. And if I go back to the first page and we looked at the accounts receivable, we thought we saw that the accounts receivable will net out still. So if I look at this aging, the accounts receivable by customer and refresh it, there's no more AAA. The total still ties out, which is 528152, which ties out to what's on the balance sheet, 528152. And we should have an adjustment to our inventory. So if I refresh this, it should go back up to 10 here. So I'm going to run it. So the inventory is back. Hold on a sec. As of 23 now, I got to bring it up a notch. So now we have the inventory has gone up to 10. We're at the 9625. So the 809625. Okay, so now let's say that I want to change this account to either sales returns and allowances possibly or like bad debt. We could do either one instead of reversing the revenue account. So we're going to say, hey, look, I don't want on the income statement to reverse revenue because I want revenue always to go up. I want to put my sales returns on another line or just call it bad debt, which would be an expense. So same kind of concept conceptually to kind of figure that out. So if I go back to the first tab and I go into my credit memo and say, okay, how can I tweak this now in order to do that? Well, one thing I can do is I can say that I'm going to make another item here that's going to be driving to record something to bad debt instead of the reversing of the sale.  I'm going to copy that copy and then I'm going to put that in the description and the sales price. I'm not going to put anything and then instead of going to an income account, I wanted to go to bad debt, which I might not have an account here for. If I didn't have an account, I would just set one up. I'm going to say it's going to be an expense account. Now I'm going to do it to bad debt here. You could do the same things for an allowance account, which would be a contra sales, which we might take a look at as well. Here I'm just going to put other for now other business expense and I'm going to call it bad debt expense. And then there it is. So let's save it and their attacks taxes. I'm not going to put actually no, I do want to have it taxable because I wanted to mirror the same thing here. So we'll make that a taxable item. So I'm going to say save it. If it wasn't taxable, then you can then you'd have to mirror whether the thing's going to be taxable or not. And then I'm going to say one and I'm just going to put the thousand dollars here. And then it's going to be a taxable item. Then I'm going to remove the amount up top. So now this is what it looks like. So we still have the same amount down here, but now because this second item is going to be driving it to bad debt. So what's this going to do? Well, it's still going to going to reverse the accounts receivable by the full amount of the 1,080 because it is a credit memo. The other side is not going to go to sales though because this item is zero. That's the one that drives to sales. It's instead going to go to this one, which is which is driving it to the bad debt account in this example. And that's only going to be for the 1,000 and then it's still going to reverse the sales tax because we have the same amount here. And it's calculating the sales tax, which will still give us a nice reversal of the sales tax. And then the inventory is still going to go down because it's going to be driven by this item. That's why we still need this item here because this item, although zero, that means it's not going to have an impact on the revenue account. It's still going to be decreasing the inventory or in this case increasing the inventory because we're putting the inventory back on the books. And it's going to be bringing it's going to be reversing the cost of goods sold as well. So the cost of goods sold went up with the invoice. Now the cost of goods sold is going to go back down. So this is a nice kind of fancy way or a little bit of a tricky way. It seems a little abstract when you first look at it to basically do that.  But if we're getting the inventory back, then we still need this line item here to adjust the inventory. So let's save it and close it and just check that out. The transactions you're editing is linked. Are you sure you want to replace it? I'm going to say yes. Normally we wouldn't do that after we've already linked it and closed it. But there it is. So now if I go back to the balance sheet, I won't check all the accounts. We should still be in the same area with the accounts receivable and whatnot. The thing that changed now should be the income statement account. If I run this report, instead of us reversing the sales now, we reversed it to the cost of goods sold. That's the point. That's why we did it. So that's one thing you can do. Now maybe you don't want it in cost of goods sold, but maybe you want a contra account as a contra sales account. So a sales returns and allowances account, for example. So let's just do it one more time. I'm going to go back to the first tab and I'm going to go into that credit memo again. And let's populate it the way it was. The way it was is I had 1,000 here and I'm going to delete this second line. So it's the same strategy. I'm just going to make another item down here to go to sales returns and allowances, which is a contra income account, a contra revenue account as opposed to an expense account. So we'll just do the same thing.  You might be able to call it a non inventory as well. The point is we're not tracking inventory with it, you know, so I'm going to make it a service item. This is going to be sales returns. I'll just call it that and copy that. We're going to put that in the description here. I'm sorry. I'm not going to put a rate on it because I'll just populate the rate. It's not going to go into services. That's the point. I'm going to make another account here, which I'm going to call an income type of account, but it's going to be a contra income account. It's going to be a negative kind of income account. So other primary income, I'll just call it that and I'll call it sales returns and allowances. And there it is. We'll run that, save it and close it. And then I'll do the same thing here. I'll put the thousand dollars here and just delete the thousand up top. We end up with the same result. So what's this going to do? It's a credit memo. It's going to reverse the accounts receivable for the full amount, which is the same 1,080. The other side's not going to reduce sales. However, but instead be driven by this one to sales returns and allowances a contra sales account. So we don't decrease the revenue directly. And then we're still reversing the sales tax payable, which is good. And then the inventory is still impacted by this line item. That's why we still need it. So it's going to go back up and the cost of goods sold is going to go down and the sub accounts of accounts receivable by customer as well as the inventory should be impacted the same way as well. So save it and close it. And we're going kind of long on the time here. So I'll try to check it real quick. And we're going to go to the balance to the income statement income statement, which is here. And run it. So now we did the same idea, but now we've got these two in the same line. So sales only goes up. And then you've got the sales returns and allowances showing the returns. That's oftentimes how you like to report the income side of things having the income accounts only go up and then have a contra account showing those reversals that took place breaking those out oftentimes. Okay, let's go back to the first tab. And I'm going to hit the cog dropdown switch to the business view just so we can see where some of these items are located and the business view. So if I go back up to the get things done, if we hit the plus button, we've got our same forms here. There's the credit memo. No change really there. We've been working in the get paid pay area primarily where we have our get paid. There's our customer area that we've been working in primarily. We also created an invoice so you can go into the invoice here and sort on the invoices that way. And then we were looking at the the transactions which are in the the bookkeeping area down here and then the transactions up top. And we can look at the sales transactions. And that's where we have all of our transactions and we looked in here for once again those invoices that were open invoices. But you can also search in here for like the other sales transactions like a credit memo, for example. And so now we can kind of search for we can we can sort this item by the credit memo. And then of course we looked at the reports and reports are in the business overview and the report. It's just another all the stuff should be basically in this you know format of it. There it's just in a different kind of location with different terminologies on the tabs just the skin deep differences typically.


Well, right. Well, welcome to another ADHD talk. It's Friday morning at about 11. And today, I am joined by Amanda co who is a chemical engineer who designs wearable devices. So welcome Amanda, I'm going to read a little bit about about you and then you and I are going to have a really fun talk. So Dr. Amanda co completed her PhD in chemical engineering at Renz, Renzler. I don't know how to. It's a layer. Renzlier. So I have trouble remembering how to spell it. Yeah, it's a French word. Polytechnic Institute and her BS is from MIT. The research group focuses on engineering multifunctional materials through intentional design of interfaces current research focuses on materials for soft robotics stretchable electronics, sensing and environmental remediation. She's an assistant professor at the University of Alabama, and she's currently a fellow with the collaborative arts research initiative, Carrie, which is one of the ways that I found her. So welcome, Amanda, to the world of humanities. Digital humanities specifically. And I'm going to go ahead and ask you our first question. So many of us wear devices that help us measure our biometric data. I wear a Fitbit and it definitely helps me stay grounded. It reminds me to get up and move it helps me be aware of my stress level. And it helps me with time management. I very poor with my time management I get some hyper focus and lose track of time sometimes I forget to eat or I forget to go home in the afternoon sometimes. So my Fitbit definitely helps me with those things. And I'm just curious. How did you become interested in designing wearable devices. And what are some of the previous devices that you've worked on or have made. So, real devices are really interesting because I think when you first think of them like you know Fitbit comes to mind. There's even like you know there's t shirts that maybe have some something that comes against your chest maybe it's a response to kind of your temperature.  These are all things that sense something about you something about kind of who you are what how you your current state. The things that are currently out there. I have a lot of challenges. I mean even thinking about kind of. Even in the last few years how well like the iPhone has done and kind of picking up your emotion or how good Fitbits have kind of gone over their lifetime. It's not easy to be good at being a wearable device. You know, maybe there's a motion of just up and down so they can dissect something about kind of changes in and gravitate your gravitational motion essentially. So if we're trying to get kind of more fine tune understanding of your body, particularly things we're thinking about like medical responses or medical devices. Things that can really not just say gross understanding of your body but fine movements, things that can help you biologically things that can help you biochemically things that really have fine understanding of kind of who you are and what how your body moves is something that's still being developed. And what's really exciting when I kind of gotten to, I started doing stuff like this in my postdoc, so I wrote the postdoc with the army research lab. And that's where I kind of gotten to the world of soft robotics and special electronics and things like that. And this idea of using soft materials rather than your Fitbit is made out of copper and you know this hard shell and things like that. But if you wanted something that can detect as you're moving know you're you're stretching you're deforming you need a material that's going to move with you. But how do you kind of get that and still have all the kind of electrical, your computer is all really hard stuff. How do you kind of get the best of both worlds how do you hopefully do both. You kind of have the electrical impulses the ability to sense, but still have material that can move like you are. I mean think of your skin your skill is really good at stretching your skin is really good at moving your skin is good at kind of, as you're going it goes with you. A Fitbit can't do that and iPhone can't do that you know your teacher, at least like the thing that's in. I remember maybe was on college is really big to get these teachers are like your turn turned made sounds or some colors or something based on kind of where you were. You can do that find great understanding and it really takes understanding soft materials, the electronics and the mechanical part pieces of it in order to do that. And there's a lot of really interesting examples kind of that are on the edge of being commercialized you know glucose sensors are a really big thing right now, where they're able to detect things about your body really biochemically and not only detect them but be able to kind of give you a dose of insulin or something like that on its own. So you don't have to take out kind of an insulin shot or things like that is, I got to really do a deep dive into that I got an opportunity to write a book chapter about kind of wearable like biochemical sensors and stuff. There's all kinds of really cool stuff out there and I'll say when I think about wearable I really do think about like a glove or a garment or something like that and I'll talk about that in a second but there's some really interesting wearable stuff and wearable to be like a contact lens could be something that goes on your teeth, and it responds to something in your saliva or responses something kind of in your tears. There's things like you know making bandages that have some sort of sensor in them so they can actually deliver you know drugs or things like that based on the you know the temperature or particular biomolecules that show that something is going wrong. There's a lot of really cool stuff out there. So for me, I, I, I like to know what am I interested in and I want to actually do something useful like I want to do something good for the world not just you know in my lab and just play with toys which is fun, like it's definitely one of the reasons to become an engineer, but I wanted to make sure that we're helping humanity as very miss America. But when I look at kind of being interested in soft materials and these soft electronics, how can we make sensors that conform to the body, understand the body help us understand the body. Particularly what I was interested in is really trying to get kind of the blending of sensitivity and signal. So there's a lot of stuff out there that either. Think of like your if you weigh yourself it's a scale you step on it and tell you how much your way and it's pretty good at you know once you're above a certain weight, it can tell you with some amount of accuracy. So you kind of really, you don't need the like and decimal place. I don't care that I'm some number of point seven seven seven seven seven pounds like that's unusual. There's also people who are working on super super sensitive things. So think about kind of putting, you can take your finger and you can kind of my hand sent to me really dry. So I can put a finger kind of over my my palm, and I can feel every little bump I can feel kind of the texture of my skin things like that. There are there are people who are working on sensors that are really good on that end of it as well. I'm really interested in how do you do both. How do you kind of these gross, these larger kind of measurements, but still get kind of those fine details. One of the reasons that I kind of first started thinking about this is that I was looking at sensors you can put in the soles of your shoes, for example, was something that can detect that you're standing up or how you're walking or things like that. And that exists like there are commercialized versions of that they're usually pretty expensive and they're usually kind of restricted to like occupational therapy or things like that. But they do exist. What I was interested in is how do we kind of use those sensors to not necessarily predict but see as you are getting injured or maybe as you're recovering. And that's kind of that slow descent into something being wrong. And that's not something that's going to be a big change and you know I weigh this much versus this much or you know, I can't stand up versus I can. It can be as you're aging, or maybe as you're recovering from a stroke or something like that, that's small changes and how you're getting better. We're not able to capture that right now because not only does it have to be my whole body measurement, but it has to be those kind of fine changes of if I'm standing. If I'm a healthy person, I should be able to stand with equal balance over both of my feet kind of distributing my weight, and it should be kind of fairly evenly distribute over my feet. How do I tell you know I'm slightly leaning this way or I'm leaning forward or how does that change kind of based on a certain stimuli. That was something that was really interesting to me, in particular, from the game that I did my postdoc with the military. And there's a lot of when you come back to come back to service or think of, you know, being at UA, big thing you come you're back on the field for example you get injured, and you want to get you you want to be back playing or you want to be back on your role kind of as quickly as possible. And it's up to usually occupational therapist or something like that to say whether you're good or not. And first of all that takes a ton of experience. Yeah, not only just kind of your degree but the time you take to kind of learn how to look at that. You're able to get that last, you know, by 10% of you know you're really all the way. Certainly you can tell you know from injured to some amount. But that last five or 10% can still make the difference between whether you have to come back or not you get re injured because you weren't 100% you were 90% or something like that. And maybe for me that doesn't matter because I spend most of my time in the lab or walking around. I'm in the football field and people are smashing into me at real, really big people are smashing really fast that last 10% can matter, or if I'm a soldier in the field and I have to carry enormous amounts of weight. So how do we detect kind of those last bits and last stages of kind of getting better. So one of the things that really interested me at first in terms of wearable sensors and using kind of these soft materials trying to understand kind of the electronics of them. It's funny because I definitely took physics my freshman year college and was like I'm done, never do this again, like, and then nope. Came back and decided to do not just my postdoc but my faculty position that dealing with kind of electronic electronics and em and things like that. And then, so I always kind of interested in how these soft materials can help people. And I say this a lot for kind of all my projects is that I never try to be a solution in search of a problem. I want to make sure that we have kind of what the, what the, what the problem is in mind as we're kind of making our material and making our sensors. And part of Carrie before I actually joined Kerry at there was like a coffee lab. And I was talking to two of these professors, you know, and they said, they were, they were interested in their, they were vocal professors at different departments. And they're interesting basically seeing, you know, they spent a lot of time with their students teaching them how to breathe in a certain way breathing that's appropriate for a singer. And there was all kinds of interesting conversations that we had about what that means, which is something I was not aware of at all. But again, this kind of it was similar to the occupational therapist was that they required a lot of experience. They had to look at the person they had to constantly know this is where you need to be changing this is not expanding your kind of this needs to be, and then so much knowledge of anatomy it was, they were there, they are they still, they're still working with it. They're amazing in kind of what they're doing. There's a lot it was very laborious. And it's also on the student side, you kind of just have to understand what it is the teacher is talking about and you know internalize what it means that you need to expand more versus this versus contract or move or something like that. They were talking to you it's their way to quantify that. And you know, I say particularly as the my generation slash certainly the next generation, I see like a video game like okay I needed to be 10 and if I get 10 that I get the you know the next level or something like that so give me a number, and then I can try to achieve that number and I'll do kind of whatever it needs. So there's something we could do about you know changing your breathing behavior, and this is not kind of how they put it but that big I think about things in terms of numbers and video games and things like that. So give me kind of a number to achieve and then I can figure out what I need to do that. So is there a way to quantify essentially this kind of breathing motion this breathing behavior. So that's kind of led to this, this mixture between kind of the vocal music and and sensing is that if we can put something where if it's a if it's a mechanical movement expansion or contraction, we can measure that we can take our sensors things normally kind of stretchable materials and put it on the body, and how we put it on the body is an interesting question on its own. But basically, how do we detect that you're that your chest is expanding or contracting, or that your posture isn't very good. And maybe those are kind of simpler, simpler ones, you know how much is expanding or contracting all along the torso, all the different pieces of your anatomy on the sides of your body things like that. So I'm going to put these sensors, and hopefully extract numbers of like this is how much. This is where you are now this is how you are maybe we've started. This is the trend that you're making. Maybe you can think about, you know, exercises you did or practices you had that worked practices that didn't, based on kind of you can see where your numbers are changing or not really powerful to be able to quantify how your performance is changing initially. That's how I ended up in this particular project. There's so much kind of wearable stuff that's interesting out there. I think there's a lot of really interesting work now of how do we translate it to be useful. Now a lot of people have made interesting materials and certainly I will continue to make interesting materials, but how do we make it so that, you know, someone in the humanities or someone in music is can use it you know it's not just. There's like a really classic picture of a grad students like finger and a paper where they have like a sensor right here, like look, they can do that and then detect it, which is good, but like that's not getting us anywhere right now. So how do we kind of make that next step. Yeah, oh my goodness, like, as you're talking I'm thinking like all of the spy craft movies that I've ever watched. And I also am thinking a lot about like Octavia butler's xenogenesis series I don't know if you've ever read those but like just the when you like our skin as sensors or our skin is wearable devices or like comparing them to our skin or anatomy like, like, what, what you get to work on is like bringing to life all of this sci fi fiction that we've read all of all, you know, for fun. And I just think that that's just like such a dream job to even be able to know how to do that. You've spoken a little bit about your current project already about the wearable device for breathing. Um, so I guess I want to know more specifically like, what are you hoping to measure. And how does that even work. How are the sensors that you're working on warn and what kind of sensors are they like what does that even mean. You know because you say that like there's a lot of different kinds of sensors so like, what, what are they and what are they measuring and how, how do you put them together in order to correspond with each other and come out with a reading. I'll start kind of the thing that my, my lab are like bread and butter kind of thing is making something called dielectric material dielectric material is part of a capacitor capacitor is one of these kind of fundamental units of a circuit. And I am remembering that physics from em not wasn't my favorite thing in the world, but you know now I'm actually going back to it. So I don't pretend to be an electrical engineer, but the basics. Yeah, for this dirt capacitor and doctor, you have all these sorts of things. So we focus on the capacitor we focus on the dielectric material. The capacitor is really simple. It has a top plate and a bottom plate that are both conductive and something in material that between this dielectric material. You put kind of a field across this the dielectric material. It polarizes you think of kind of pieces molecules in the dielectric material will respond to the field and orient in a certain way. And that's how you can store power. And that's kind of our story electricity. I want to be. I mean you're talking about back to the future at the moment right. I, that's what I'm seeing is the flux capacitor and like story. Pretty sure. I think everyone you say when your kid is gigawatts and it's really gigawatts. It's like, well, who made this decision to like, say it this way. But, yeah. But so we make this material that goes in between the conductor plates essentially and trying to make it polarize better. And there's a lot of materials out there that can do this. There's a lot of ceramic materials that can do this. Ceramics are hard ceramics are rigid. That doesn't really do it for us, you know, if we want to have something that's affordable with the body. So we want to have a polymer polymer being this kind of soft stretching material, but polymers on their own. There's something called permittivity, which is like how good essentially the dielectric material is, and we want the permittivity to be as high as possible. And most polymers are like to maybe they're 3 and there's not you can change the chemistry of the polymer, you know, they're basically this number. There's not a lot you can do to that. What we do is we mix things into the polymer, making a composite to increase that permittivity without having to change anything about the chemistry. And what my what I did with my postdoc and kind of what our power zone is actually using liquid metal. So we use a metal that is liquid at room temperature, going back to the sci-fi think a terminator to the like metal guy that's that's what we're working with. We cannot do that if we could do that. My career, I could just retire now. We were able to basically mix those liquid metal into it and we increase the permittivity we make it more sensitive, we're able to kind of respond to these it feels better. So we take that material and it doesn't have to be liquid metal it can be any kind of other conductive materials things like that, we can basically, again blend the keeping it soft while keeping it kind of electrically interesting and we're very good at doing that understanding kind of the trade offs and tuning those two things. And liquid metal is interesting because how much do you want to use it's fairly expensive so we kind of think about this as a real final application we have always have to think about what our filler is. But we take that we make the dielectric material. And essentially the way you actually make it as a sensor is that capacitance, the kind of what a, what we can read, you know thing like an oh meter or a multi meter kind of things that maybe you're like an electrician can can have, always has their back pocket is based on how thick the material is. So if I have this plate and this plate, even if the material in the middle is the same, this has one capacitance. It has another capacity. Just how about the distances between the two plates. If I take material and I stretch it. It gets thinner by taking material and compress it, it gets thinner.  I'm making me kind of calibration curves we do all kinds of stuff with this material, basically just to say, if you, if you stretch it 20% we know what that number should be, you stretch it 40% we know what that number should be. So if I take going back to the classic kind of grass an example, if I take something kind of put it over my knuckle, I will stretch as I'm moving. And I can say basically how much it had to stretch how much your finger move based on the difference in the capacity. So this is a it's a capacitive pressure, capacitive pressure sensor, capacitive tensile sensor, tensile being stretching pressure being compressing. Does that make sense kind of so far. Oh yeah. Okay, I'm glad. So that's, that's kind of the, the bones of it is that this is it's responding to either compression or tension or something like that, and it either compresses or does something kind of changing that thickness. So, the interesting question that you asked that with how do we actually wear it. Because putting it on the body. I'm not just gluing things. People don't tend to want that. Even, there is actually a lot of work in, I don't know if you've been like EG or EKG or things like that to like nasty wet things you have to put on you and they clip stuff on. I think that's unpleasant. It's also not very robust like it move, you can't do anything while you're doing that. It's gross because you'll have to wash all that stuff off like I've had to do a lot of like heart monitoring and stuff and just go home you like want to take a shower getting all that stuff off of you. So how do we do it where you can get kind of motion and things on the body without having to have kind of that wet connection. So we're actually trying to figure out what the best way is to, what the what the garment so we're going to put on a garment essentially, what does that garment need to look like in order to best move with the body, and what fabric just it's kind of it's very like going back to kind of it started with art and then went to engineering is kind of going back to art as well as how do we kind of make something how do we make a construct a garment that can do that the best. And I actually really like to sew. So I was really excited he actually bought a sewing machine for the lab and we've been using it to make it was like one of my career goals is to build a research sewing machine. But we actually started collaborating or working with someone in our dance costume costume department but she did work on Tiffany Jaeger. She does costumes for ballet, where you know they have to stick with you these people have crazy amounts of movement and they're doing all kinds of stuff. And she's really excited to work with us and say, hey, how do we make something that can be worn on the body and that basically the ideas as I'm breathing, the garment will expand with my breath. And as I'm moving the garment will expand basically that the fabric will move with whatever I'm doing. And the next question like once you have that garment, how do we put the sensors on it, such that the sensors will also move with the fabric. And these are kind of surprisingly different questions. Even just kind of taking your material and taking our dielectric or sensors and putting it on fabric has been an interesting challenge. Our initial material we worked with was a polymer based on silicone. And the most common thing that people will think of silicone is it's a lubricant you know it's really slippery. It means that it's not good to glue things to it. So, it's funny even these kind of like classic is a glue everything does not work. So how do you actually stick that to the fabric we actually had that we've now transitioned to a slightly different polymer different soft material, which kind of just melt into the fabric and your fabric is a weave right and has pores. So if you just kind of melt into it it fills those pores, and we'll kind of stretch with the fabric to some extent it seems like that's been working which is nice. So one really good undergraduate student get Gabrielle Motley, who has he's a Randall scholar so all kinds of good research stuff, and she's been working hard and really trying to figure out how we can put these materials on the fabric. And then as we stretch it doesn't stay actually stretching with the fabric does it not delaminated or kind of like peel off. But she's kind of figure out maybe a system that works with that the fabric I think we're ending up using Tiffany gave us a whole bunch of different fabrics basically different types of spandexes, spandexes, whatever the plural of spandex would be. So everything from this really open weave to like compression sock kind of type of material, and gorilla figure like figure out how to kind of put this on, we think in a fairly robust way. So now she's actually gonna go back and actually try and make the garment. And I think that we're looking at now. And I think maybe because we are a team of largely women women of different sizes women of different backgrounds. It's important even now to kind of start. If you want this to be something that can be useful for people doing any kind of breathing behavior, it should fit everybody. It's not something that's going to fit one body type it's not going to fit you know one height one one. Anything what your body looks like we want to make sure that this is going to be useful for anybody. And it's funny because even on the even on our, I have three undergrads who are working on this with me which they've all been really great and even between them we have very different body types different heights things like that. Jordan and Anthony, Jordan Evans and Anthony Joyce away they get a shout out as well. They've all been trying to keep in mind how do we put this, I don't make it so I'm just like a tube and it only works for one, one person. So we have like black jacket kind of thing where it had it goes over your head and maybe like snaps or has something tied down the side so you can make kind of different height different widths of it. There's a couple of different sizes. The thing is that we're interested in when I talked to kind of to the vocal professors, they were interested in all these kind of different locations on the body, and someone who's you know five one if I put a sensor here, and then someone who's six one I put a sense of here, it's in a different place on their body, and they're not necessarily going to get the same measurement. So how do we kind of figure out on these different sizes. Where do those sensors need to go. So that's kind of the next step in the work is that once we have a garment that does seem to kind of expand and contract and move with the person. What is it. Where do the sensors need to go in order to kind of get all the data that we want. And, I mean, from an academic side, we could just but says there's everywhere, you know, it could just be covered in these types of materials. And maybe that's what we start with first and then kind of take things off as they don't end up being useful. But the hope certainly, I think this is, you know, we're talking about your five year plan, your 10 year plan whatever. I think this is a reasonable you know next five years for this to be a commercially translatable product, which means that we do, we do want to have strategically have placed the sensors kind of where you're going to get the best and most useful information. But that's, that's kind of where this is going. I'll say that. So this was this is inspired partially partially by kind of joining Kerry and kind of talking to people and Kerry. The other piece of this that was really interesting and partially kind of how I tried to justify it to my very not music and art oriented department. Was that if you can take someone who's, you know, a normal healthy student and take that person to a professional level, then can you take someone who's unhealthy someone who's have breathing dysfunction and bring them back to a healthy level. So using kind of the same sorts of methods. So, and that would be hugely beneficial. There's something that you don't need extra drugs for, you know, you don't have to change your biochemistry. It can be something that maybe you could do at home. So, can we develop the device and the techniques so that someone could go home and kind of basically increase their breathing capacity improves their breathing behavior. So that's something we're working on kind of an NIH proposal and out to try and and start doing that as well. But I think understanding kind of this breathing behavior in general and how we can take advantage of what clearly vocal professors have been doing for very, very long time and quantifying that and kind of expanding the utility of that beyond just maybe the vocal profession. So interesting, like I'm thinking about people who have had surgery and have had to be intubated, you know, they always give you that breathing thing where you have to like how this could change like that experience and people with beginning stages of COPD and asthma and just like how many different things there are out there, even recovering from like pneumonia and bronchitis can be so challenging because breathing is such an issue and all of these people that have long COVID and long issues with that like there's just such there's such a diverse demographic of people that this could really improve their quality of life. I just think that's, there's just so much out there. I think that one of my curiosities is, I think when we first talked, you were telling me about, you know, just like the, the specific measures of breathing for singing and breathing for vocal training. And I guess one of my questions is, like, can you talk a little bit about the science of measuring for breathing for, for voice. And how is that different from the way that we normal breathe normally breathe like I understand on a really, really, really broad level that the breathing is different just like my breathing is different if I'm running or I'm going upstairs or things like that. But like, can you describe to us how that breathing is different and why it's been a why breathing for voice would be beneficial as a, as a model or a framework for this. I'll start off saying that I'm definitely not the expert and as I've learned a lot from kind of the vocal collaborators. I think the biggest example I could give you. So I first started talking to him about this project, shortly after my first daughter was born, and they asked now you know how what does it look like when a singer, someone who's a professional singer vocal, vocal professional breath versus you know how I breathe. And it was a very uncomfortable lunch because they started pointing a seed they're doing that and that's how you breathe and they're like, I didn't realize I was breathing wrong the whole time. But they mentioned that if you look at a newborn or an infant the way that they breathe is they, when they're asleep for example, their stomach will go up and down. And then if you look at an adult, your chest goes up and down, and that you're supposed to be breathing with your, with your, your lower abdomen not your upper abdomen that's where you can kind of get the most of your of your breathing, your the best button lung capacity and kind of the best behavior. And somehow, you know, the question of you how do we, how does this help us understand kind of like people in generals, why, when does that happen, how, why does that happen. I mean, they're, I asked them to like, you know, you're socialized to, to breathe with your chest, which I think is something being socialized I think of like, you know, your teacher telling you that you know girls aren't good at math and boys aren't good at being emotional something like that's what I think of being socialized which is not good. I don't remember anyone ever telling me like, you're breathing with your stomach, like that's bad breathe more with your chest. Like, and if I look and now I have two daughters and my, my seven month old definitely breathes with her stomach and my two year old is already breathing with her chest, like something happened. And like, I never said anything no one ever talked about that. Like, how does that happen. And that was my understanding is that basically the vocal. A lot of the vocal training is kind of going back to how you're supposed to be, how you kind of started as a human of you know breathing with with your lower abdomen, if there's more space there you know that it's, you can get more, more air more oxygen more into your lungs by using that part of your anatomy. But if we're breathing we're just always doing it with our chest and then I mean this is under your rib cage there's only so much space up here. So that my being able to figure out, and there's a lot of things like your posture. How do you maximize volume that your lungs can kind of take up, but then there's different parts of you that can handle breath differently. And like, when I talked to a lot of arts and people kind of through carry for example. They're very still focused. I need to talk a lot about the art things and things I don't necessarily understand and I learned a lot from them. It was the first time I went to an art professor and they started taking teaching me a lot more about the science. I was like, oh, you know, way more about anatomy than I ever would have. And they talk about the muscle names and all that. So that's kind of really what I got out of you know how do you, how do you maximize the volume of your lungs essentially. The way to do that is to control your abdomen controls the volume control the space that your lungs take up. And you don't really think about that and if you're hunched over even as you're contracting or if you are you're anything you want to be very over your center you do things that maybe sound kind of like yoga. And being kind of like a lion and things like that. It was really interesting that for whatever reason, I would have thought that we just always start chest breathing because that's easy. I mean I don't know why, but the fact that we start the kind of correct breathing or the breathing that isn't as a most optimal. I'm going to switch out of that. I wonder if you talk about running and walking I wonder if there is something about how, like the, the chemistry or kind of how oxygen transfers. Maybe there's something that's easier about like it's more efficient or something when you have to do it really quickly. That kind of takes advantage of maybe the more chest breathing. I don't know that I've ever seen anyone actually try and study that. I don't know what kind of biochemistry looks like. But is, I mean I literally went to something I went home and my daughter fell asleep and was like, they're correct. Like she is doing the thing that she is better at breathing than I am essentially and she has been around for a few months and I have been around for much longer than that. So that's, that was just wild to me that that was something that really was important for this kind of vocal and all of that.  And because this person had this training, not only were they able to overcome this setback, but they were still singing professionally. They're still thinking better than I could, and they're still breathing better than I could, even though they had you know parts of their lungs weren't working. And it just seems like such a powerful thing to tap into like yeah I'm glad that you know I love Broadway I'm glad that people can sing like that's great but how tapping that into people who there's so much you have pharmacokinetics and you know people trying to do new drugs and it's always hard and things don't work the way you're supposed to and people don't always take them the way they're supposed to. It was just saying I think of when I say just it's not easy. I mean people come and they major in these things right like there are people whose jobs are to train it so I don't want to minimize that at all, but harnessing that instead of having to change something about your biochemistry just seems such a powerful tool to get people able to breathe more optimally again. I don't know. I just think so much like I know when my kid was really little. He had terrible asthma for like two years his first two or three years and we always had to do like breathing treatments and, you know, lots and lots of albedo, you know, and I remember reading a lot because academics attack their problems and solve their trauma through research a lot of the time. I remember reading a lot about how when you hold your child close to you. Like, there, there is some biofeedback that happens between you and your child and, and there, there had been some studies, I remember about just even like breathing normalizing by being close, you know, being held and being close. And, and I find that really fascinating the idea that we're socializing just by having like contact with our infants. Right. And it doesn't require you to be the biological parent it just requires you to be a human that is close and holding. Right. There are so many other things that happen in our brain development that control our systems through that that biofeedback that we get from being held close. It's fascinating. But, you know, to your point of like how do we learn how to chest breathe, we pass on a bad habit. You know, kind of like, I don't know, myriad other bad habits that we pass on to our kids accidentally. And I guess the study couldn't really be done of like how do you have a kid who's never held never kind of experienced that and then do they continue kind of doing you know belly breathing. Like that's a terrible experiment and that would never pass any RV anywhere. But that is that what it, what would that person be like like what would their breathing capacity, what would their athletic capacity your vocal capacity be if they've never got that kind of that feedback. You think of all the things that you try to do they're good for your kids you know holding them close like well, even that like right like I can't do anything right as a parent. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. I mean there's just so much that this leads into my last question, which is a very humanities based question we've got. You know the humanities conversations. They're very different from science conversations sometimes although they, they are often on scientific topics, humanities, folks really like to take like the science and ask the big picture questions about them about how, how does this make us human or how does this apply to being human or, you know, how does this impact us right. Any number of questions that Donna what Donna Haraway asks applied to your work. So, I have the question. I'm intrigued by the idea of considering wearable devices as a humanistic pursuit. Something that allows us to develop a relationship with our bodies and to understand ourselves on a new level. How do you think a wearable device changes our perception of what it means to be human, or to know ourselves as human, and what kinds of impacts do you think devices have had. And what kinds of ideas do you have for the future impact of where wearable devices on our understanding of what it is to be human. But the big question is that you know I like the big question. Yeah, I mean I think that one, one take on that and I don't know if this is really getting at what you're what you're asking. But I think that, especially with all the AI in the news right now and we think of when we think of robots and science fiction. There's AI which is the computers and just kind of exist in the ether robots or maybe this physical manifestation of that. But certainly when you look at sci fi the next step closer to humans is the biotic people right you know people who have replaced their legs or arms or limbs or organs or something with with robotic parts. But if we get to the point of kind of wearable sensors where you are. Like, can you just be broken down to a series of numbers, like in your, like your, your movement, your, I mean certainly the type of things I do or our movement and position and things like that but you know everything about you know your biochemistry and your, your, if you, if you can be put into a computer, just like a running set of numbers, like what does that actually mean, like how that, like that's that file is you have a file with you yesterday I can track all of your movement. I can track all of your brain signals, I can track kind of your eye movement I can track kind of your electrical impulses I can, like, that's, we're getting certainly getting to the point where we can really quantify using kind of wearable and I'll say implantable devices as well, kind of really quantify a lot of kind of just who you are. But then what does that mean to be who you are right and just the electrical impulses doesn't say we were certainly not there like what are you thinking. There's all kinds of interesting stuff now of being, and if you've seen these kind of wearable sensors you can you can wear them and based on your brain impulses you can control, like the movement of things. They're actually at the museum in Huntsville they have an example of this where you can kind of play is like a toy version of it. And certainly it's not perfect and there's a there's a professor at UA who's working on doing something like this. But, like, we can do really good job of at least picking up these signals. So, like, where we're really kind of blur is that line between you know there's like there's human and there's robot like if you can be numbers if we can just say you are a series of numbers. But you're not right and you're you say yeah. And science and engineering is much easier deal with the series and you were a series of numbers we could, we could cure everything like we could treat everything everything would be would be perfect and you're not. It's really one of the things that comes up a lot in research is I can I teach health and safety. And then there's the fluid mechanics and all the reactor design and all that and everything works perfectly and then you put a person into it and everything falls apart. People are always going to be kind of this really different animal, but sensors are kind of really just more and more kind of quantity in the breathing right is quantifying something that previously was something that really had to be experienced. And I think that's that's really interesting. And I suppose also, there's the aid aspect of a lot of these sensors. So it's not just what your status is but what can we do to kind of change that status. So the glucose monitor is a really good example of like you can register your glucose and we can basically just immediately give you insulin. But there are also examples and maybe I always go back to our robots, is that if I, if I'm wearing a sensor, and I can tell that I'm standing and I want to jump. And it is trained that when I put this amount of force onto the sensor is going to give me feedback of twice that amount of force, so I can jump higher, I can run faster, I can be stronger. Ironman is in the future, but it is not inconceivable to have kind of these devices that can tell basically what you're trying to do and amplify that. Right. That's just kind of kind of nuts and whether it's military or athletics or things like that. And it all really comes down to sensors, because if you are working on a with a group or on a project now that's trying to look at kind of like constructed construction workers, where there's a lot of labor, really labor intensive tasks that you have to pick something up. It goes along with nurses as well where you might have these kind of smaller people who still need to pick up. And it says you need to be able to move them off the bed or whatever and be really useful to kind of give that person that basically extra strict beyond what they could normally do. But there are devices that try to do that now and because they can't sense where you are and kind of what your force is now, they tend to give too much, or they give it in the wrong direction and ends up hurting you or kind of making you extra tired. So these sensors are really going to enable all these kind of additive and kind of things on top of what you can normally do. She's really cool and really exciting. But then, you know, kind of where is the line maybe somewhere there are are you numbers where where is the human to the bionic to robot kind of thing and I guess the other piece of that also is what does the sensors mean to be human. But when we make a lot of these sensors doing them in a vacuum we're really oftentimes trying to mimic what the body can do. Like when skit that your skin, your nose is an amazing biosensor we can't make anything nearly as good as your nose.  Everything we're doing is really trying to just get as good as we are. But then we take the sensors and we put them on robot. Not only kind of putting sensors on us and kind of making us a lot until kind of numbers and data, we're trying to get robots to be more like us. We're trying to get that kind of skin that can respond to and understand the environment that can balance itself better because it has sensors on the bottom of kind of the feet and we can make, you know, just go into kind of animals birds that can sense air better robots that can sense air better like birds so that they can use less power and we're really trying to use these sensors not just to kind of quantify us but to make robots more like us. I think that's an interesting question maybe as well as you know, again, learning that line of human robot. Sensor, you know, it's an interesting world. Yeah, I mean it's age old right we've got, we've got stories and stories and stories about the, you know, the, the blurred line between humans and cyborgs and humans. We've been watching Dr who with with our nine year old and, you know, the whole cyborg storyline or sub subplot comes to mind where you have, you know, all of the human intellect with all of the emotion stripped out of it. And is that still human like if you remove the emotion out of it is it still human and I think those are really fascinating questions to ask when we, when we have these because obviously the devices that you're working on have nothing to do with altering the emotions but but certainly they can monitor and leverage emotional response right and it makes me think of the Android stream of electric sheets and that kind of software. If they if they, it walks like a duck and talks like a duck you know, at some point is it just a duck. Yeah, yeah. We're not there yet and I don't think my, I don't know what the timeline is but definitely science is moving in that direction for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I have a sister who's a paramedic and she certainly could use some of that, you know, extra strength she she has to, she has a similar build to mine and you know, lifting stretchers and people, especially people who are you know paramedics and nurses and did not going to say, Oh, you're big and I am small so I can't pick you up like they're going to do it anyway. But then, you know, nurses have horrible back problems and things like that and how can we take these people who are putting their bodies on the line and make things better for them. Absolutely. It's so much fun Amanda. I just want to talk forever. But we're coming to time. And I was wondering if you have any questions for me as we wrap this conversation up. I think in talking to you I think I've better gotten a better understanding of what humanities means I suppose that I feel like humanities was a class that took a junior high that really meant English and social studies. Yeah, what is what is humanities what is digital humanities I appreciate kind of getting the chance to me again this last question of what what does it mean to be human I think I don't think about stuff like that very often and but I do read a lot of science fiction which I think does often ask, you know, what does it mean to be human. Yeah, I have a question but I think you've given me a lot to think about kind of just. Yeah, I have, I have a lot more that I want to chat with you about informally not being recorded. But as far as just like the crossover between those things like, because I read a lot of science fiction too and I read a lot of like post human theory and, you know, just the fun questions of like where are, where are the lines between human and not human. Like, how do we define that from like post structuralist ideas like when you pull things apart and really start trying to categorize them like how you how can you find a stable category that is that is human and what does that mean. Right, so yeah. More conversations to come but I just appreciate your time so much this has been so lovely and I think so many people are going to enjoy listening to your talk today and just thinking about all of these things especially, you know, a lot of humanities folks are super. Super curious when we start hearing scientists talk about stuff like this so thank you for for offering your time to feed us with some fun ideas. Great well thank you so much for talking to me as well. Yeah. So we're going to go ahead and wrap this up. And this has been great. And I'm going to stop recording.