‘My ADHD led me to invent fingernails that could link to a credit card’
Eneni Bambara-Abban wants to prove that tech can be ‘fun’ through her wild creations
A London-based robotics engineer has told how she uses her ADHD to power her imaginative creations.
From high-tech nail extensions that connect to webpages to clothing that integrates with weather forecasts, Eneni Bambara-Abban’s work aims to inspire the next generation, demonstrating that tech can be "fun".
She also said that her ADHD has helped her come up with some of her creations, such as acrylic nails linked to a credit card.
The 32-year-old creative technologist harboured engineering ambitions from the tender age of five, ignited by the wonder of a walking doll.
This early fascination led her to meticulously dismantle household gadgets, driven by a desire to comprehend their inner workings.
Despite achieving top grades in her GCSE science subjects, Eneni faced a setback when her A-level results meant she was denied entry to a robotics engineering degree at the University of the West of England.
Still determined to achieve her childhood goal, she wrote a heartfelt letter to the dean and was offered a place on the foundation engineering course, which she began in 2012 before progressing to the degree the following year.
She said she was the only black woman on the course, leaving her feeling “isolated” and almost causing her to quit, until she was inspired by women she met at an engineering awards ceremony to keep going.
From there, she began exploring wearable technology, including how circuit boards could be embedded into nails and linked to a webpage – and which could, if regulations allowed, even be used to make payments.
Since graduating, she has shared her innovations online, founded The Techover Foundation, and begun developing smart clothing that can be scanned and linked to weather forecasts, showing young people – especially women – that engineering can be “creative”.
Ms Bambara-Abban told PA Real Life: “I always thought ‘Why is tech so boring, so dry, why can’t it be fun?’.
“And back then, I was very obsessed with Japanese culture and I used to get nail extensions with designs of my favourite characters.
“Also, having undiagnosed ADHD back then, I was always forgetting things, so I constantly thought to myself ‘What if I had a way to put a chip inside me for my credit card, my room key, or my uni pass, that I would never lose?’.
“Then I came up with the idea of combining the two – semi-permanent nail extensions with a circuit embedded into them.”
Speaking about the doll that inspired her life-long fascination with engineering, Ms Bambara-Abban said: “The doll was black, which in the ’90s was already quite rare… and then the guy showed my family it walking around and teetering along, I was just amazed.
“I can still remember it so vividly, like it was yesterday, I just was like ‘What kind of sorcery is this? How can I be a wizard?’.”
After studying at university, she attended an award ceremony at the Institution of Engineering and Technology, where she became inspired by the women in technology that she met.
From there, she began exploring ways of making engineering fun and much more appealing to other young women with hopes it would inspire more people to consider pursuing similar courses to her. One of those ways was through wearable technology.
After some brainstorming and consulting with electronics experts, she realised in theory that by leveraging NFC (near-field communication), she could be able to use a chip from a credit card, attach it to a nail, and that “hypothetically it might still work”.
So Ms Bambara-Abban began working on circuit designs to repurpose NFC technology into wearable tech.
She explained: “The first initial prototypes were done on breadboards, which are reusable construction bases for building temporary electronic circuits without soldering – it looks like a rectangular board with loads of little holes on it.”
She then sent the designs to an electronics factory in China to make it miniature, by printing “very fine circuits onto thin flexible surfaces” which would be the perfect texture to integrate into acrylic nails because of being able to curve to the nail’s natural shape.
It is, Ms Bambara-Abban said, “quite common with engineering” to outsource builds and work with a team – inventors rarely build the actual finished products alone.
It was also much cheaper to outsource – Ms Bambara-Abban said it would have cost her “thousands”, but the factory could manufacture the same item for 30p a piece.
“The first completed nail extensions were press-ons with a range of my favourite designs that I knew young women would love – you scanned it and it would link to any webpage you wanted, you could even programme them to open up your Instagram,” she added.
She also linked it to a “dummy bank” with a “dummy bank card”, allowing it “hypothetically” to be used for payments.
For this, she would put the flexible chip – which worked in a similar way to smart rings and smart watches – on a nail bed, and then put the nail gel on top to “lock it in” and ensure it was not visible to others.
However, she soon realised that although technically feasible, it would not be practical in everyday life because of strict financial regulations as well as ethical concerns.
Eneni said: “I like to often recall a quote from one of the greatest franchises of all time – Spider-Man, of course – that says ‘with great power, comes great responsibility’. Even if I can do something as an engineer, it doesn’t mean I should…
“I won’t be fully connecting the circuit to (my actual bank account) or making it available publicly in the near future until the right safety and compliance protocols are met.”
She graduated in 2018 from her robotics degree, and now shares her projects on her Instagram page @thetechover – which has more than 6,000 followers.
Ms Bambara-Abban also launched The Techover Foundation, aiming to inspire the next generation of Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) students, particularly those from under-served backgrounds.
She has since visited schools across the world, from the UK to the Philippines and Nigeria, to show young people what engineering makes possible.
“I just feel like one of the major things deterring women from getting in and staying in engineering is imposter syndrome, and feeling like they’re alone or unseen due to it still, sadly, being a male-dominated industry,” She said.
“But times are changing. I want to show that engineering is for everyone, regardless of gender.”