Hello All,

This week started with a lot of enthusiasm. We had drafted out IRB and submitted it, and we had schedule our focus group for Thursday at 3:00pm, and we hoped our IRB would be approved before Thursday…(Keep reading to find out more)

On Monday, Gabby and I submitted our paper for peer review after making some updates. That day Tom got sick, and he did not come in, so Gabby and I did not meet him that day. On Tuesday, Gabby, Tom, and I met with James and Patrick for our weekly meeting, where we caught them up with our progress. They gave us some good advises for the focus group, and we talked about the structure of our paper. Right after the meeting with our faculty mentors, we had a beta testing session where we simulated our Focus Group with the help of Julia, Ciabhan, Meagan, and Max. They took on the roles of the medical providers that Gabby, Tom, and I were supposed to meet on Thursday during the real Focus Group. The actors did an amazing job, they sounded like they were real medical providers.

Wednesday arrived and the IRB had not been approved yet. Gabby and I kept iterating over our paper. On Wednesday afternoon, we all the REU students attended a presentation by Dr. Katie Siek where she lectured about poster presentations. It was a very insightful and helpful presentation.

Thursday morning arrived and our IRB had not been approved yet. Tom, Gabby, and I agreed that we would wait until 11:30pm, and if it didn’t get approved before then, we would cancel the focus group. Guess what? It didn’t get approved before then. However, Tom, Gabby, and I met around 1:30pm to discuss plan B because the next time that we could schedule the focus groups are July 13th, and August 20 something… (don’t remember the exact day), for which I will not be here anymore. Anyways, we while we were in our meeting, we go an email at 2:00pm saying that our IRB had been approved. If only we had kept our faith a little longer…

Tom, Gabby, and I decided that we want to go ahead and explore what kind of technology we want to create to support DCC’s patients from researchers’ perspectives. On Thursday afternoon, Gabby and I started looking at exemplar objects to see what is already available, and for each app that we encountered, we outlined what we liked about it, and what we think is missing or could be improved. On Wednesday and Thursday next week, Tom, Gabby and I are expecting to have two long (about 5 hrs) brainstorming sessions to discuss design venues and start building our wireframes.

On Friday, Gabby and I got our peer review responses and we added the reviewers’ comments to our reviewer response table.

I created my website last week, and Tom gave me a lot of feedback on it about how to improve it, but I have not worked on it again, I plan to do that next week. Anyways, my website can be accessed here.

Until next time…