Engineering meets ballet: A smart solution for safer pointe work

In her final year as an undergraduate at USC, dancer Kaitlyn Kumar tore a ligament during a rehearsal for the ballet Sleeping Beauty — but powered through the pain to perform anyway, thanks to ample amounts of ibuprofen and Tiger Balm. “That’s just what dancers do,” she said.   

Now a master’s student in robotics at the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering, Kumar has turned her injury into innovation. She’s part of a student team developing PointeSense, a smart toe pad and ankle band designed to help prevent injuries in ballet dancers who perform en pointe—a demanding technique where the dancer balances all their weight on the tips of their toes. 

“Our invention is placed snugly into a ballet pointe shoe and fitted with a series of pressure sensors,” said Kumar. “PointeSense helps dancers improve their pointe technique by detecting mistakes in real-time and using gentle vibrations to guide their feet into the correct position.” 

Kumar co-invented PointeSense with fellow dancer and biomedical engineering major Christine Fernandez and biomedical engineering master’s students Daniel Campuzano and Bryan Sabogal, as a project in the university’s Principles of Design of Biomedical Instrumentation/Honors Instrumentation course sequence. 

In the ballet world, injuries like Kumar’s are remarkably common, with eight out of 10 dancers experiencing some form of physical damage each year, from stress fractures and ankle sprains to toe and toenail injuries. While pointe work is an iconic feature of classical ballet, inadequate strength and improper form often lead to injury.  

“The engineer in me started thinking, why aren’t we using technology to better understand what is happening in the shoe that causes these injuries?” said Kumar. 

Pointe requires specialized shoes with reinforced, rigid toe boxes created from layers of fabric, cardboard, and glue. The unforgiving surface leads many dancers to wear protective toe pads inside these shoes to prevent bruising and blisters. During their research, the team discovered that no commercially available products used pressure sensing technology to correct alignment, and nothing existed that could provide real-time feedback from within the toe box.  

The team started designing in the fall of 2024, first creating a simple toe pad equipped with two sensors that could signal when a dancer’s alignment was off. Over the course of two semesters, the prototype evolved significantly: It now features 64 sensors and generates a detailed “pressure map” of the foot as dancers perform. Machine learning analyzes this data and translates it into haptic feedback—vibrations from the ankle band that steer the foot toward correct pointe alignment, a key factor in preventing injury. 

All this technology is packed into a tiny space—the 1.5-to-2-inch wide toe box of an average point shoe, wrapping around the toes like the front half of a no-show sock.

To make this possible, the students partnered with the Neuroengineering and Biomedical Instrumentation Lab, directed by Nitish Thakor, professor of biomedical engineering. The PointeSense system builds on flexible pressure-sensing technology developed by PhD student Arik Slepyan, who worked with the team to create sensors for the toe pad that are as thin and flexible as a sheet of paper. 

“A big design challenge for us was fitting this into a very small space, while still being comfortable and unobtrusive enough for a dancer to wear during a performance,” said Fernandez.  

The team says that PointeSense also has the potential to not only assist in properly fitting pointe shoes and selecting the optimal shoe for each dancer’s needs but also to benefit people in other professions and activities with a high risk of foot injuries, such as rock climbing and cycling. 

 So far, the team has been testing the prototype with members of the JHU Ballet Company and plans to expand their testing to include other dancers of varying skill levels, from beginners to experts. The eventual goal is to publish their findings and pursue a patent, they say. 

For Kumar and Fernandez, both lifelong dancers, this isn’t just an engineering challenge—it’s personal.  

“This is a great example of how engineering and dance can come together not only to prevent injury but also to empower dancers to perform at their very best,” said Kumar.