Maggie Delano

Assistant Professor
Engineering Department
Swarthmore College

Office: Singer 233
Email: mdelano1@swarthmore.edu
Phone: 610-328-8295

Schedule office hours or appointment

I’m an Assistant Professor of Engineering at Swarthmore College. My research interests include the development of monitoring systems for chronic diseases and inclusive engineering design. For my PhD dissertation, I built a fluid status monitor for patients with congestive heart failure with Professor Charlie Sodini. While in graduate school, I was also co-organizer of Quantified Self Boston and started the Quantified Self Boston Women’s Meetup. You can find a list of my publications here and a list of the courses I’ve taught here.

My current embedded systems research focuses on the use of textile electrodes for long term fluid status monitoring using bioimpedance measurements. Long term bioimpedance measurements are currently infeasible as standard electrodes (Ag/AgCl) dry out over time. My research group has demonstrated that textile band electrodes may be a viable alternative to standard Ag/AgCl electrodes that dry out over time. However, textile electrodes come with artifacts that must be eliminated for these systems to be viable. We are currently working on techniques to eliminate these artifacts and will be presenting our latest work at EMBC 2023 this summer.

Both my research and my experiences with the Quantified Self community have stimulated my interest in inclusive and anti-oppressive design. In Fall 2020, I taught the first iteration of my inclusive engineering design course, a course that is “half seminar, half design studio.” I have co-authored several papers on inclusive design, including articles about adversarial machine learning, along with research into the use of sex/gender data in medical machine learning applications. I have also written articles for a general audience, such as an article on the design of period tracking apps, and on privacy concerns with respect to period trackers post-Dobbs .

For full details on my research, teaching and writing, check out my CV. I’m also experimenting with a digital garden for sharing curated content and resources, which you can find here.