As the first week of my Proactive Health Informatics REU at Indiana University comes to a close, I have learned that this will be an academically challenging and inspiring summer. My mentors, colleagues and roommates are fantastic and I couldn’t be happier. I am incredibly grateful for my both my family and Penn State Millennium family for helping get me here.

Sam and I will be working together this summer.

Today, I started the day by meeting with my graduate mentor, Ben Jelen. He is fantastic! I am truly excited to begin working alongside him and Katie Siek, my faculty mentor. We hope to empower older adults to create their own health sensing devices. We will be in the early phase of Ben’s project and we will learn a lot about participatory design studies. There is a definite need for older adults to work on self managing their own health, beyond doctor visits, because the United States has a clearly aging population.The baby boomer generation is nearing the retirement age and people are living longer. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, “People 65+ represented 14.5% of the population in the year 2014 but are expected to grow to be 21.7% of the population by 2040.” We will write in our paper about our experiences with user studies, electronics and older adult crafting groups. I am also thrilled to be working with Sam Whitman on this project this summer. She and I will be a great team.

My colleagues and I eating at Qdoba!

This afternoon we also had a little competition between the ProHealth students while giving elevator speeches about the research that we will be doing this summer. I was lucky enough to get 3rd place for a $5 amazon gift card. YAY! It was a great experience.

This was my pitch: Hello everyone. My name is Olivia Richards and I am a freshman mathematics student from Penn State University. With an interest in applied math, I found my research home in HCI, developing an interface for people, of all walks of life, to understand and ask questions of their own personal data. This summer, I am working alongside Katie Siek and Ben Jelen to help empower older adults to create their own health sensing devices. As older adults already represent over 15% of our population and the baby boomers are nearing retirement, self-management of health becomes more and more of a pressing problem that we can all solve together. 

The four of us won the elevator speech competition.

We had donuts and tea which made it even better!