Hello everyone, hope you week has gone smoothly. I like to think that Week 3 has gone smoothly, but I shall let you be the judge.

This week’s title is especially expository, for during week 2 Ray, Arash, and myself were given the task of determining the inputs for our software application as well as establishing a platform to synthesize it with. This week has been filled with diligence and perseverance, so let me fill you in on our progress iteratively.

Monday, June 04

Today was a productive day. Right off the bat I came into work and began reading an excellent study by Anthony Wasserman titled Software Engineering Issues for Mobile Application Development. I chose this article because I had an inkling that our cohort would be developing our software via a mobile medium. I learned that we must account for interactions with other applications when designing our application and that security is the utmost priority because of the potential for malware to corrupt the program. The display screen is relatively small, so the user must be able to view all important widgets, icons, and text without the screen feeling too saturated. The application must also be supported by multiple versions of the same operating system, but typical SDKs make this component of software engineering somewhat painless. I also had a productive meeting with Ray and Arash, where we decided we would develop the application for the phone. We decided that we would use Apple’s iOS operating system, given the myriads of smartphone users who use iPhone’s and Apple products. I learned that I will have to develop a fundamental grasp for the programming language Swift 4, albeit I have heard it is not too difficult to pick up. I also completed an interview with ProHealth Social Media Chair Gustavo Razo, for Ray and I will be the featured research team of the week on the ProHealth Facebook website. Finally, I concluded the day reading From Personal Informatics to Family Informatics: Understanding Family Practices Around Health Monitoring by Pina et al., which discussed the implementation of family data tracking practices into technologies designed for the family as opposed to an individual user. Dr. Siek also informed me that I am able to request for her to order a book on Swift 4 via Amazon, so i plan to do that for our team to utilize. I cannot wait to share my opinions in the reading group for Tuesday.

Tuesday June 05

Upon arriving at work today I was able to review our two articles that would be discussed with our reading coalition, the joint research paper discussion between my group and Dr. Siek and Cassie’s group which deals with support for those who have had miscarriages. Discussion was thought-provoking and I have procured new lenses to analyze research articles under, which include IRB appropriate and relevant inclusion of methods. The group decided that From Personal Informatics to Family Informatics: Understanding Family Practices Around Health Monitoring was a poorly constructed paper with extraneous quotations that were not pertinent to the study and that should have been omitted. I noted that the study was limited to sleeping patterns of children with JIA, but did not engage in families constituting of children of other chronic conditions, which made it too specific. Arash noted the introduction never ended, and Cassie seemed to dislike the article altogether. We reached a consensus that Digital Motherhood was a better article with only one setback: the researcher was a pregnant mother and perhaps she would exhibit bias on which pregnant mother accounts would be included. The rest of the day I spent reading Does Social Network Site Use Matter for Mothers? Implications for Bonding and Bridging Capital which I thought was well done and informed me that mothers use SNSs to locate and connect with other mothers in similar situations as their own. Finally, toward the end of the day, Arash, Ray, and myself had a meeting to attempt to determine the inputs of our software application. We decided that we would try to have input stem from a voice memo interface, and that we should do research on implementing this software and have that information ready for Thursday. Dr. Siek also gave us some great advice for directionality of the app. She suggested we should implement a sharing aspect that stratified posts to different groups one wanted to have see posts. Other groups would not be able to view the information shared with a specific group. I also began learning some Swift 4 and plan to have Katie order a book about preliminary IOS development (Dr. Clawson gave approval for Swift to be our language). I cannot wait to begin physical development and hard-coding, but I understand that we must solidify our wireframe and have a sketch prepared first.

Wednesday June 06

Work was less intensive explicitly because of the meetings and training sessions I had today. I arrived at work and was deep in some related works and methods drafting when I was whisked away to a meeting with James and Arash. Ray called into the meeting because she came down with a fever. I hope she feels better and I hope it will not inhibit our progress velocity (both speed and direction 🙂 ). My meeting with Dr. Clawson was terrific and I finally have a concrete sense of direction in terms of where this project is going and what is expected of my team in the context of software development. Dr. Clawson gave us an excellent anecdote about a project he was working on in the machine wearables field. He had been a part of a project in which soldiers that were deployed mounted surveillance cameras to their head. There was a mechanism installed ion their assault rifles that, when pressed, captured images surreptitiously. Following the 8 hour workday, soldiers were able to include this media in their After Action Reports, essentially capturing their entire day’s experience with visual evidence to utilize for reflection, evidence, or simply to jog one’s memory. This is what we are striving to accomplish in a sense. We want to capture the entire motherhood experience on a software application with images, self documentation, and other sorts of qualitative data. After that meeting I ate lunch and ran off to my next meeting, where Dr. Siek informed the REU staff on how to effectively construct introductions using the SSS:POTS method. I was also recommended an interesting book titled The Elements of Style which I think I will read. Later Ben refreshed our memories with paper circuits in preparation for Mini University next week Tuesday. The day was productive in the sense that we accomplished all housekeeping tasks. Thursday’s runway looks clear for takeoff and is wide open for major developments in methods, related works, introduction, and computer programming. I hope to accomplish all these tasks Swift-ly.

Thursday June 07

Frankly, today was a day that involved work. I finished the draft of the methods portion of the paper, but I am unsure if we will need to omit or include any more sections due to the volatility of our project. It took a big chunk of the day, but I believe it resembles closely the methodology sections you see in published research papers, so that is quite a confident booster. I pray it does get torn to pieces during or peer review periods. After working for the majority of the morning, we had our reading group meeting. The paper on User Centered Design we decided was not as professional due to its inclusion of author pictures, but its aesthetic was a pleasant change for the expected monotone black and white that constitute most research papers.  Our second paper about satisfaction rates among mothers during birth was interesting, as we chose that to include in a journal if we had one, but it droned on and had far too many statistics. We decided that if it were more succinct it would have been a better paper, not that it was not sufficient to begin with. After the meeting I continued to work on related works while Ray worked on the outline of the introduction. I concluded the day by working on getting familiar with XCode and Swift. I was able to boot up the iPhone emulator and successfully print Hello World onto the screen, which is the traditional output when learning a new language or interface. I was also able to upload app Icons using .png files, so I felt proud of that as well. I look forward to finishing up related works and the introduction by Friday, and am excited to hear more projects at the tea.

Friday June 08

Today we made leaps and bounds with our related works and methods. Dr. Clawson gave us directionality and told us to to divide the related work into subsections, one dealing with previous studies of pregnant mothers and sociotechnical intervention and one regarding microinterations. It was very helpful. We had our weekly morning meeting where I learned about Cassie’s data collection methods for her project and I learned about Fernando’s ARC study with stigmatized groups, specifically those with AIDS. Both presentations were well done and offered me insight as to how I should present in the coming weeks. After that I worked more on ShareLatex and completed the related works. I had another meeting with Dr. Clawson and he informed us of where we need to be by the end of Week 4, which is detailed in the timeline below. Arash, Ray, and I are learning swift and still experimenting with the rudimentary features in XCode. Later in the day, at 3, we had our ProHealth Tea meeting. I learned a lot about graduate experiences and now am considering Grad School, so long as it it funded. That’s all for this week, stay tuned for initial application development.

 

 

 

Timeline

Here is the timeline for the remainder of my time at the ProHealth REU.

Week 4: Complete functional diagram of mobile application and continue learning Swift 4

Week 5: Application Development (Interface and Data Storage)

Week 6: Application Development (Functions and Features)

Week 7: Application Development (Icon design and Media Intergration)

Week 8: Application Development (Address Remaining Issues)

Week 9: Produce a prototype of application and deploy for testing with REU students

Week 10: Make necessary adjustments and bug fixes for application before departure