Digital Health Young Scholars 2025

 This last week was the most nerve wracking week of all. I was very excited to work on my project this week that my partner and I even met up the weekend before to finalize our idea, plan how we will use the coding and Arduino sofrware to accomplish it, and work a bit on our academic poster. When we first arrived, we started by trying to combine our pedometer/accelerometer code with the pulse oximeter code. After a few attempts of not getting anything to show up on the screen, we finally got something and we were able to combine them. Unfortunately, they were overlapping with each other and we couldn't get any further than that. I got the idea to start our device with one component, the accelerometer. My idea was to edit the pedometer code into a tremor reader. I started by changing the name of the program and making the step count into a "tremor count". That was all for Day 1.    For Day 2, we were able to complete our academic poster and part 1 of our tremor reader code...

I definitely enjoyed figuring out how to design an app within the limited time we were given. :) I am proud of the poster we created and the problem we aim to address. :)      This week was the most rigorous one out of the three that have passed so far in the program. This last week was filled with finalizing the device we proposed to address a problem within underserved populations. The previous four days were spent on creating the research poster, coding our program, and designing an app that would sync with data from our smartwatch. As a beginner in writing C++ and Swift, getting our components to work was challenging from the start. However, with the help of supervisors and support from colleagues, building the project one by one proved to be tedious but not impossible.     In the short time I spent daily walking to Rice to reach the conducive circuits lab and work on activities highly relevant to my career and field of interest, I found that I had gro...

     Week three was the busiest week for me and my partner. We were only able to finish some of the things we wanted to do for out final project. The interface and demonstration of how it will look like is perfect in my opinion. We especially designed this application for kids since they are in the highest risk of not being able to recognize pre-asthma attacks. We tried and we are going to keep on trying to make this as accessible as possible to lower-income families, making use of electronics available to them and just a little more additionally to make the machine work: the TinyWatch. Cheaper compared to the products out in the market, and small too that will be perfect for a child's wrist.      I am extremely happy about being able to make the code for playing custom videos on the tiny watch screen. Our instructor, Dr. Young, told me that was never explored and done before. It might have taken me three hours to do but it was definitely worth it.  ...

 The last week of this program has been really eventful but also stressful at the same time. We begun to work on our final prototype which was our SmartGlasses that utilizes Object Detection and Distance Sensing. Monday and Tuesday were mostly figuring out how to use the ESP32-Cam which would allow us to do object detection in real time. While we struggled very bad these two days, we will got the camera up and running. We mainly struggled with trying to figure out how to implement a buzzer so that when the camera detects an object, one or two buzzes will sound. Other than that, we have our glasses + distance sensor configured, so our main goal is to display how the object detection would work and future hopes for the project.  I've also been reflecting heavily on this project, which has gone by very quickly. I am so glad to be able to have found a great learning and working environment while working on this project. Although our project wasn't flawless and we had many struggle...

      This week, we completed our projects: we designed the interface of our game, coded for the GPS, pulse oximeter, and pedometer, projected our design onto our tiny watch, and completed our poster. While we may have had many setbacks, especially with the code, we were able to overcome them. In order to have everything completed before Thursday, we decided to split the workload.      Monday through Wednesday, we started on our code and poster as we both took turns doing it. While we thought we were getting ahead, it was difficult not to overshare our ideas and knowledge about asthma as our poster became too wordy, and the picture was difficult to decipher. Because of this, we had to delete, rewrite, and add words so it would have a small number of words and be big enough to read from a distance. On the other hand, we were also struggling with combining all of our adrunio code. Combining the GPS, pulse oximeter, and pedometer was difficult, as we also had ...

 Week 3 Day 1: On Monday, we finally got our first prototype of the distance sensor done. It felt good seeing everything come together and actually work the way we planned. It was a big step because it showed that the core idea behind our project was solid and functional. Day 2: Tuesday was all about the poster. We worked on laying everything out clearly, from what the problem is to how our solution helps. We made sure the design looked clean and easy to understand, especially for people seeing it for the first time. Day 3: We made a big upgrade on Wednesday by adding an object-detecting camera to our prototype. It took some time to figure out how to connect and code it, but it added way more accuracy and made the whole system smarter. It made the project feel more complete. Day 4: Today we’re presenting our prototype and poster. It’s cool to see how far we’ve come since the beginning. We’re excited to show everyone what we built and explain how it could really help people with vis...