Hello all!

We started out today reviewing our summaries and observations from yesterday and then went into a presentation going into further depth on ShareLaTeX. We also dove deeper into Mendeley, the citation manager that nearly all of us chose. Finally, we discussed creating videos and press releases and discussed some do’s and don’ts for each. You can see the one our group created here.

After lunch, we got to play around some more with our LilyPad Arduinos! An Arduino is made up of a microcontroller and a piece of software that runs on your computer. The LilyPad Arduino has several LEDs, a light sensor, a sound board, a buzzer, and several other neat components; it was designed with the ability to be easily incorporated into fabrics and other wearables. Below is an example of what one looks like:

After we finished with Arduinos, we moved on to working with Tableau, a software that converts data into beautiful graphs. Below is a visualization of heart rate data from a graduate researcher at IU collected using a fitness tracking device.

From the graph, it appears that her heart rate was generally highest on Saturdays relative to nearby days. Comparing this graph to the step count data also collected, it appears there is a loose correlation between the two; for example, May 5, the day with the highest average heart rate on this graph, is the day with by far the most steps; perhaps the student went on a run or a hike that day, which increased both steps and heart rate. When looking at aggregate data by the day of the week as opposed to date, both the step count data and heart rate data have higher values on the weekends, suggesting there’s a correlation. At the same time, in general, it’s hard to draw explicit comparisons between the step count and heart rate data by the day because heart rate doesn’t vary much, while the step count data did.