Ramp up week is finally over!  This week has been very informative, we learned a lot about all the projects available and the set of skills needed for our deliverables for the program. I was awarded my top choice on the HomeShare Project with Dr. Siek, Dr. Connelly, Haley Molchan and Rashmi Bidanta. I was excited to be working with Hanifa as a summer undergraduate student. Hanifa and Haley were one of the first people I met when I arrived at the REU site so it was kind of nice to see it come full circle. We had our first meeting on Friday to go over expectations and goals over the 9 weeks and papers to begin reading.

After our morning meeting Haley, Hanifa and I walked down to the Ethos house to get a tour of the lab, some of the electronics and where most our meetings on Tuesdays would be. We also received some cool Garmin smartwatches as part of the data visualization part of our deliverables this summer to try out and wear to collect data. I really liked the Ethos house it felt very relaxed and quiet compared to the cubicle in the informatics building as I can get distracted quite easily when working.

The Health informatics also had their Friday meeting where we all went over our research interests, goals and had a funny part where we talked about things we consumed as children that are funny looking back. We also had a “Pro-health tea” where a group of faculty and students got together to go over our elevator pitches. This made me rather nervous, but I’ve had to give a lot of these at my undergraduate university.  I ended up getting second, with Susan getting first in the “Elevator talk contest”. I was a little surprised as I was extremely nervous and ended up disregarding everything I was practiced and was trying to memorize and just improvised based on what I already knew and what I remember Haley and Dr. Siek had mentioned earlier that day. It was very interesting conversating with the faculty and hearing about their research interests and talking about the undergraduate and graduate experience.

This was a very good finish to a rather information-packed week, we covered a lot of material and did some cool things in different software packages and I’m excited to really get into the research and disseminate it

Hi, I’m Eugene Malcolm Cox, I’m a 5th year senior at California State Dominguez Hills. I’m currently working on a project called homeSHARE: What we’re trying to do is to evaluate pervasive- home-based technologies of ageing in place adults using IOTS devices… Some of the problems with that are issues with usability: how we can gain meaningful data visualizations that show meaningful information to older adults. To do that were co-designs and analyzing their design ideas after giving them the product (Garmin wearables) after a week

Meaningful contribution: we want to find meaningful insights into data visualizations from wearable data in a geographically distributed testbed