September 3rd 2024 - Today, I had a meeting with the PhD student as we both completed our individual qualitative analysis portion of the data. We spent several hours discussing our findings and open codes. We found some really cool themes and created an elaborate visualization of them, which will be used in our paper. I am sad that the program is coming to the end but I learned a lot and am excited to continue contributing to this paper.

August 28th 2024 - Today, I had a meeting with the PhD student to go over my writing assignments and how I was going to conduct qualitative analysis with the data we collected during our main study. I need to listen to the audio and read the transcripts from the study and create corresponding open codes for everything we heard in order to analyze the data and create themes accordingly for the findings section of our paper.

August 22nd 2024 - Today, we went to another hospital to conduct our main study with our remaining participants. This was a completely new hospital so we were unsure how the robot would work, but it performed very well. We were happy to finish our study as we worked really hard leading up to the study.

August 15th 2024 - Today, we ran our main study at the hospital. We were able to get a lot of participants for the study because we went to the hospital super early in the morning, around 6:30 AM so that we could set up and get started quickly. We got some great feedback and our study and system ran relatively smoothly, with very minor technical difficulties. We had practiced this study several times, so we were able to work in a team together well and get through any issues quickly. Overall the study ran well.

August 5th 2024 - Today, the PhD student and I began system integration in order to integrate my clinician interface with the rest of the system. I was able to help with the websocket connection messages to ensure that the correct messages were being sent and received by the interface. The clinician interface websocket connection worked well and we ran into a few issues initially, but were able to figure it out in the end. The system integration will probably take most of this week in order to integrate fully. We also want to make sure there is enough time to pilot the study before our main study. We anticipate conducting pilots in the lab next week and a pilot in the hospital prior to our main study. We have been to the hospital a few times for mapping, but are yet to test the system integration.

July 29th 2024 - Today, my app was fully completed so we started some testing on the robot with labmates. My labmates were able to find many bugs in the app that I did not catch previously, so I spent a lot of time fixing those bugs. I also had a discussion with the PhD student to discuss which bugs were necessary to fix and which bugs we can fix for the next iteration due to time crunches.

July 24th 2024 - Today, I wrapped up all of the main functionality of the app and made the app look a lot like the Figma prototype. I was able to get feedback from my peers regarding the app and talked to the designer in order to ensure that her visions were accurately represented. Today is also my birthday, so all of the undergrads brought me a small cake to celebrate.

July 18th 2024 - Today, we had a meeting with my mentor in order to discuss updates regarding the system and the interface. I was given some great suggestions for how to improve my app and code documentation. I am continuing to complete all of the features of the app and hope to wrap up the main functionality by the end of next week. I also want to make sure that the app looks as identical to the Figma prototype as possible as I develop the new app features.

July 11th 2024 - Today, we were preparing for an interview with a clinician by conducting pilots with me and my other lab mate. My mentor conducted the interview with me and timed it in order to practice for the actual interview. I also tested out the Figma interface and the two tasks that were supposed to run seamlessly and pointed out any bugs I noticed so that it can be fixed before the interview. Throughout the day, I continued implementing the interface on XCode by adding all of the buttons on the “Add Task” page. Later in the day, we had a lab-wide meeting where we discussed everyone’s progress on their projects. Finally, we had our clinician interview and got some amazing feedback from the clinician about the interface. We should hopefully start testing out our entire system by next month and getting some more feedback from this clinician.

July 1st, 2024 - Today is my first day of research in-person for the DREU program. Today, I worked on initial onboarding work such as gaining lab access and setting up all applications that I will need for the project. I had a meeting with my PhD mentor to discuss my personal tasks for the week as well as a lab-wide meeting to discuss progress on summer tasks and lab-wide announcements. Today, I compared React.js and Swift/XCode as options for app development, and identified that Swift/Xcode may be a better fit for the project at this time. Since it was my first day, I met some of the other summer research interns and went on a quick coffee run with them as well! I got to know everyone better this way and I am excited to work with them on my summer tasks.