Experience 1: FLO2 Oxygen Control System
Date: Fall 2019 – Spring 2023 (500 Hours)
Advisors: Dr. Ann Saterbak (Spring 2020 – Spring 2023), Dr. Elizabeth Bucholz (Fall 2019)
Summary: Over 1.5 million Americans with respiratory conditions receive supplemental oxygen. To adjust their oxygen flow, patients walk across their homes – and sometimes up and down the stairs – to manually turn the knob of the concentrator flowmeter. However, it is physically taxing and potentially fatal to do this while oxygen-deprived. In EGR 101: Engineering Design & Communication, my team was tasked to engineer a method that allows patients to wirelessly control their oxygen concentrator. Our team developed FLO2, an oxygen concentrator control system allowing patients to wirelessly control their oxygen flow rate using a smartphone app. After EGR 101, our team enrolled in EGR 102: Design to Deliver for three semesters to build a fully-functional medical device. During our medical device development, we pitched our project at the First-Year Engineering Design Showcase, the 2020 Innovate Carolina Student Showcase, and to the Baquerizo Innovation Grant committee. We received the 2020 Baquerizo Innovation Grant and our manuscript was published in the journal Medical Devices: Evidence and Research (https://doi.org/10.2147/MDER.S407233). Overall, this experience exposed me to the product development and entrepreneurship aspects of engineering, allowing me to engineer a medical device that allows patients to better control medical oxygen treatment.
Experience 2: HackDuke: Code for Good 2020
Date: September 2020
Summary: Good health, both physical and mental, is something many of us take for granted until we lose it; many people struggle with disabling diseases on a daily basis. Especially with COVID-19 limiting interpersonal interactions, fighting a disease may seem like a solitary endeavor, and without a proper support network, feelings of isolation and hopelessness can defeat a person. For the HackDuke 2020 hackathon, my teammates and I developed heal together, a social network allowing patients to find new friends with similar medical conditions. Users can share stories and form supportive communities so that they are never fighting alone. During this experience, I learned about the basics of front-end web development, including UI/UX prototype design in Adobe XD and basics of HTML/CSS.
