Healthy Sleep for Kids Research Laboratory

I primarily work under Dr. Sarah Honaker as a research assistant, and I perform retrospective chart review to examine racial/ethnic disparities in diagnosis of pediatric obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). I also shadow Jonathan Wade as a mobile application development intern. Under him, I trained to develop applications in Xamarin and C# programming languages. The main application I will be building is a remodel of NICU companion, an app to enable parents of newborns to keep a track of their infant’s daily health data. The purpose behind redesigning the old app is to provide better and more efficient functionality to current as well as future users. The programming language, Xamarin, was selected as it allows deployment of the app for multi-platform devices thus eliminating the need to develop individually for Android and iOS. Currently, the app does not collect any data and stores data locally. Future plans for the app include data sharing with patients and health care providers, as well as tailored suggestions such as recommended diet for infants based on weight and other body measurements for parents. For my project, I will be preparing a slideshow presentation to show the dual responsibilities that I held through this internship. The presentation would include technical details about the old app as well as the new one highlighting the upgrades and changes and how it serves the users. To make the app more reliable I plan to conduct interview with a nurse or a parent who might have been past user to understand how they would want it to work.