By Susan Kelley for the Cornell Chronicle

Cindy Hsin-Liu Kao was a doctoral student in the early 2010s when smartwatches were all the rage. As a researcher of wearable tech, she tried several. “They were doing all this amazing stuff – it’s an amazing piece of engineering, no question,” she says.

But the watches were bulky and too big for her wrists. “And the aesthetic just did not reflect who I was,” she says. “It was hard for me to wear them with everything else I had in my wardrobe.”