Meet Pranay Dogra, the Bellarmine Preparatory School senior whose brainchild — the app CueLens — is taking a stride to empower people on the autistic spectrum. The app itself uses something called “emotional subtitles,” a live tool facilitating virtual calls to help users navigate social situations and read facial cues. 

Starting as a volunteer at the Autism Acculturation Center PRAGNYA in 2024, Dogra had the chance to hear from parents of and advocates for autistic children. Of these testimonies, Dogra said he vividly remembers a boy who was punched in the face after failing to recognize the conversation’s shift to a serious topic and “overstepp[ing] a line” — an experience that enkindled a responsibility to help. 

“Up until then, I’d thought of difficulty reading emotions as a mild inconvenience,” Dogra said. “But realizing that a missed emotional cue could escalate into something physical changed everything for me.” 

Learning that people with autism often have difficulty with the concept of “theory of mind,” which refers to the ability to infer what others are thinking or feeling, Dogra searched for solutions to make social interactions less exhausting and isolating. With the goal of making conversations feel less like a “guessing game,” he said he adapted ideas from American Sign Language translation devices and movie subtitles for nonverbal cues like facial expressions. 

Since typical methods of teaching facial expressions, such as flashcards and YouTube videos, often lack applicability to daily life, Dogra started building CueLens for people on the “high-functioning” end of the autism spectrum. He said his program is, essentially, based on the fact that explaining what certain cues are allows those on the autism spectrum to process them in context. 

The birth of CueLens, however, came after many trials and many failures. Initially, Dogra began building a physical eyeglass, inspired by Stanford’s Autism Glass Project, based on the perspectives he’d gained from therapists, autism clinicians, entrepreneurs, cognitive science professors and app developers. However, after receiving feedback from a clinician and a biotech startup founder, the idea was revised. 

“They pointed out that creating a physical device would be overstimulating for some on the spectrum and a physical product was not feasible to push out to people,” Dogra said over email. “I scrapped that [idea] and started tinkering with an online version so it would work in Zoom calls and Google Meets.” 

After transitioning to this digital rebrand, Dogra entered CueLens in Santa Clara University’s Accelerator Prep School program, where he gained access to more resources and opportunities to see his app in live action. There, he received a $500 prize for the “Most Interdisciplinary” award against collegiate startup teams from around the United States. 

“Users in India’s expressions would be biased towards angry and tired,” Dogra said. “[That meant that CueLens] would misinterpret expressions that required more cultural nuance.” 

Eager to gain more feedback, Dogra brought CueLens to the autism advocacy event Pragnya Festival, where he introduced CueLens to students and witnessed the impact of his work. 

“I vividly remember seeing that ‘light-bulb’ going off in their head, finally connecting the dots between that emotion and what it looks like,” Dogra said. 

Other than in-person events, Dogra reaches out to families individually to test CueLens for a few weeks at a time before he checks in to collect feedback and suggestions. As of now, CueLens is yet to be publicly available on the App Store, but it is envisioned to be a full-scale mobile app with cultural modes and improvements in the future. 

Some of Dogra’s goals include expanding to other neurodivergent conditions like alexithymia, accounting for the overall context of a conversation and reaching higher levels of nuance to detect sarcasm — all to enhance communication and confidence. 

Dogra said CueLens is more than just serving as a first step to navigating social situations; it attests/endorses that people with autism deserve to be accepted. 

“It’s also on neurotypicals to make [people with autism] feel included,” Dogra said. “This could mean waiting an extra beat and being more patient with them. True inclusion won’t just come with an app — it’s something that needs to be advocated for in our culture.” 

For more information on CueLens, visit https://cuelens.vercel.app/our-story.html .