From PhD struggles to AI screening: A Bangladeshi engineer tackling autism

When electrical engineer Tahsina Sanam returned to Bangladesh in 2020 after completing her PhD abroad, she enrolled her son in a school that had a separate programme for autistic children. Accompanying her son on the schoolbus, she took notice of the characteristic movements of many of these children – headbanging or handflapping being among the most recognizable. When she spoke with parents of these students, they told her that while these movements were now easy to observe, that hadn’t always been the case. “When the kids were at an early age, they could not recognize that their children had some form of autism.” In fact, many children in Bangladesh with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are not diagnosed until around age 10 or later. Part of the reason for this, Tahsina explains, is a general lack of expertise and awareness among pediatricians and doctors in the country; fewer than 10 doctors in the country are specialized in dealing with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Earlier diagnosis of ASD allows for interventions that help improve outcomes in terms of cognitive, language, and social skills, so oversights in diagnosis can cause this critical window to be missed.

Tahsina began to ask herself whether there was a way to apply her scientific expertise to this problem. As a PhD student in electrical engineering, her PhD research had focused on using wireless signal technology to analyze human movement. “If I capture a wifi signal and put it in an AI or machine learning algorithm, it can classify whether I am jogging, or whether I am lying down or sitting down…Can I use this for the betterment of humankind?”

Autism diagnosis especially in advanced economies like the United States and Europe has often relied in recent years on wearable devices, such as headbands, that can detect movements – or lack of movements – characteristic of children with ASD. But wearable devices can be irritating to children with autism, who often try to remove the devices. Tahsina’s intervention will provide an entirely contactless way to observe these movements. “Wifi signals are always passing through us. We don’t see it, we don’t feel it, but when it passes through our body it can capture our movement.” Using machine learning, Tahsina will develop an algorithm trained on this data to distinguish certain movements – or lack of movements – characteristic of children with ASD.

In order to develop a basis for this machine learning component of her project, Tahsina will rely on cooperation with hospitals, schools, and individual pediatric neurologists that work with large numbers of children with ASD. Her algorithm will be trained using data from children from ages 2.5-7 that are already known or suspected to have some form of autism, along with a control group. Once the algorithm has been developed, the project will be rolled out more widely through nationwide seminars urging parents to come to testing centers for early screening. Children whose movements are flagged by unusual wifi patterns during the screening will be referred for further diagnostic testing by clinicians.

This type of wireless kinetic sensing technology has previously been applied mostly in security settings, where it can analyze movements of people inside buildings to distinguish intruders from routine occupants and to identify what kinds of activities they are engaged in. This was the focus of Tahsina’s PhD research. After receiving her PhD, however, “I felt that I should use my technology to solve the problems of my country. I always feel more motivated if I see that my research is having a direct impact.”

Tahsina’s motivation to help children specifically comes largely from her own experience as a mother to her son, now aged 10. “Kids are the best gift of our lives. We can have PhDs, we can have awards, but none of this matters if we don’t have healthy children…There are many issues I would like to solve for my country, but I thought about this every day.”  (Tahsina does, however, also work on other applications of this technology to solve issues such as smart traffic management in Bangladesh).

Engineering attracted Tahsina from a young age. “When I was I high school, I could study maths and science for hours and hours.” In Bangladesh, however, “all the parents want their daughters to be physicians. They think that female children can be doctors, but not engineers…I always thought, why not?” While her sister and brother did choose the medicine path, Tahsina decided to follow her natural interests in spite of social expectations. She determined to get accepted to the top engineering university in Bangladesh, BUET (Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology). Following the admission exam, she discovered that not only had she been accepted, she had ranked within the top 150 students on the exam, which meant she was eligible to enrol in the university’s prestigious programme for electrical and computer engineering. Tahsina was one of 25 female students out of 130 total in the programme. Though they faced doubts and discrimination from their male classmates, “we gradually proved ourselves and showed them that yes, we can do it.”

After receiving her Master’s degree also from BUET, Tahsina and her husband were both accepted to do their PhDs at Rutgers University in the United States. Their son was just 7 months old. Without family or domestic support, Tahsina found herself struggling to keep up with the demands of raising a child and studying for her PhD. “I used to sleep 3-4 hours a night, maximum. When my son went to bed, I started studying. When I finished studying and went to bed, he woke up.” There were moments she came close to giving up, calling her own mother in tears, but her mother encouraged her to persevere. Now, as Professor in the Institute of Appropriate Technology at BUET, Tahsina says her son’s pride in her makes the sleepless nights feel worth it. “I feel very good when he tells me ‘Mom, you did it.’”

Tahsina offers a word of advice to women who wish to follow in her footsteps. “It doesn’t matter developing or developed country, as women there are fundamental issues, like doing the PhD or higher education at the right time, starting a family at the right time, doing our job while raising a family, because if we postpone our jobs we will fall behind, or if we don’t have kids, we will get too old to have babies. Male scientists don’t have to think about these things, as much as we say the world is now equal. We just need to keep telling ourselves, never quit. Don’t give up. The hard times will pass, and if we stick to our passion, we can reach what we dream of.”

In Tahsina’s case, the dreams are big ones. “I could be happy that I am an engineer, that’s enough in my country. But I always keep pushing myself, that I should not stop here, that whatever knowledge I have gained, I should deliver it to my country and beyond my country, to the world.”