MDes Student Sneha Rao Featured in Smithsonian Magazine for Tact
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. “She talked about never being able to take a pregnancy test alone,” says Rao. 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. “It was really about the systemic invisibility of blind and low-vision women in health care design more broadly,” she says.
“That stuck with me, because it wasn’t just about the inconvenience,” explains Rao. “It was about moments where privacy is a safety need.” As Hewitson suggested: What if a blind person had no one they could trust to help them with a pregnancy test, or were in an abusive relationship?
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.