Occasionally, a story comes along that’s so great I have to share it asap.

Meet Danielle Feerst.

She’s the CEO of AutismSees, a startup dedicated to creating technology – apps – to help people with autism make successful public presentations. She’s a rising junior at Tufts University.

The first app is iPresentWell, and it’s in Beta on the app store. It’s fully functional, but the AutismSees teams hopes to add more functionality – user eye contact and facial recognition tracking – through a Seedkicks fundraiser. On the scale of worthwhile projects, this one is a YES. They’ve raised about $3500 of a hoped-for $15K.

Danielle says, “We are hoping to gather user feedback and design feedback with our summer trial partner, Goodwill of Silicon Valley. Goodwill is piloting a program to hire and train youth with higher functioning ASD in job interviews and social skills, that they are rolling out this summer. So we have kept in contact with them and are developing a new interactive web application and feature changes for our iOS app this fall.  All money we raise on Seedkicks – AutismSees will go to our development and fall research at Tufts University.”

Here’s more about Danielle. She says, “I’m a rising junior at Tufts studying engineering psych and minoring in ELS. I sing and dance and I’m a sailor. I was on the sailing team at Tufts freshman year, but now I teach math and science through STOMP – which is the Student Teacher Outreach mentorship program at the Center for Engineering at Tufts. This fall I’ll be dancing and continuing to participate in my sorority on campus, Chi Omega. I’m from Charleston, SC and I currently am the CEO of Autism and work as a summer engineering intern at Draper Lab MIT.”

I asked her about her experience as a public speaker. She recalls, “My first experience public speaking was in 5th grade – I did a 4H state and district pubic speaking contest where I won a Gold Medal at each position going against other students who were 13 and 14 years old. I remember loving the contest and overcoming any anxiety pretty early on. I also did Model UN and Mock Trial – where I was voted Best Attorney at the state level for my high school, Ashley Hall. I participated in all my school’s plays and was active in musical theater, Show Choir, our high school choir, and a community performing arts center. So I’ve always had a passion for theater, public presentation, and speaking.”

Please visit the AutismSees site, and participate in the Seedkicks campaign, to provide a way for autistic people to engage more fully with the world, and specifically in public speaking.

You might say I have a special connection to people with autism, because of an experience I had as a 17-year-old that seems to, in some ways, have mirrored the autism experience.

I was tobogganing with a couple of friends on a cold, icy afternoon. The first run went smoothly, and so, with 17-year-old bravado, I said, “we didn’t go fast enough.” My friends suggested that perhaps I’d like to try a solo run, and so I did.

I got a running start, jumped on the toboggan, and crashed headfirst into a tree on the second turn. I fractured my skull, and was taken to Geisinger Medical Center in Hershey, PA, and operated on by the neurosurgeons there for a subdural hematoma – a blood clot – that was putting pressure on my brain and causing intense pain.

I was in a coma for a few days, and at some point during that coma, I died briefly – for a total of about 15 minutes. I came back to life, woke up, and asked the nurse “Where am I?” because, despite the cliché, it was what I wanted to know first.

The doctor was relieved too, because my question meant that I was at least roughly intact, mentally speaking.

As it turned out, I was alive, yes, but not everything was normal. Over the next several weeks, I noticed that something odd had happened to my mental processes. The world – or at least the people in it – had become distant and strange for me.

I couldn’t figure out affect – intent – in other people. Their words seemed hollow. I couldn’t tell what they were thinking, or feeling. I knew I should be able to tell what was going on with other people, but I couldn’t. Everyone around me seemed like automatons, robots, without the affect I was used to from before the accident.

Something in me had switched off, I had no idea what, and it meant that people were suddenly complete mysteries to me. It was terrifying.

So I began to study body language consciously, in a deliberate and indeed panicked attempt to figure out what people were feeling, what their intent was, what they actually meant. I focused obsessively on gesture, facial expressions, posture, the ways people revealed tension in their arms and shoulders, the way they moved closer or further away from each other, their smiles and frowns – everything, in short, that I could see that might tell me something about what they were feeling.

And then, after a couple of months of agonized and largely unsuccessful efforts to read people, efforts that were making me more and more anxious and depressed, something switched on again. The part of my brain that read other people effortlessly, more or less, switched back on as mysteriously as it had switched off.

I was lucky – the ability to read people came back to me with work and time. Autistic people are not so lucky – they can find it very difficult to read people in that way the rest of us take for granted. I’m thrilled to see a group of young people working to provide technology that may help.  Thank you, Danielle and the team at AutismSees:  Davika Patel, Catherine Mitchell, and Alix Generous.

A part of this post is adapted from my new book, Power Cues:  The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others, and Maximizing Your Personal Impact, published May 13, 2014 by Harvard. You can order it here.