Week 4 - Arnold Chen

 

            This week, I continued to develop the mobile app for my project, attended the infectious diseases conference, and shadowed a doctor in the Cornell clinical trials unit (CCTU) in Chelsea which includes some clinics.

            At the infectious diseases conference, one of the cases discussed was a case of an infection. This person has bronchiectasis, which is a condition in which the airways of the lungs are enlarged. This leads to increased amount of mucus in the airways, which then increases the amount of bacteria in the lungs, and increasing the likelihood of infection. The person is also frequently outdoors and has mentioned that he was bitten by a tick, which led the doctors to suspect tick-born diseases such as anaplasmosis or ehrlichiosis. Different methods to test for this include a red blood cell smear or buffy coat method to test for the presence of the anaplasma or ehrlichia bacteria. It was interesting to hear and learn about these methods used to test for blood parasites. The antibiotic determined in this case was levofloxacin, which is suitable for treating infections of the upper respiratory tract among other areas of the body. At this conference, one of the first-year fellows who just started a week or two ago also presented for the first time at this conference, and it was great to see his progress and analysis of his case.

            In terms of the app, I have combined the concepts of navigation, user input, passing parameters, camera-taking functionalities into a more polished version of the app. Below is what one of the sample pages look like currently. The app will eventually need to either allow the user view the photos in an organized manner or upload to some database.

At CCTU, I met with Dr. Ellsworth in the CCTU in Chelsea, which is also where the app will be used. He provided some suggestions, such as allowing the user to take multiple photos then proceed to label them as a group (rather than take one photo, label, then repeat), among other advice regarding the perspective from the user-end. Since the mobile app is intended to be used towards take photos of the cervix in low-resource settings, I also got the opportunity to observe an anoscopy procedure, which the mobile app can also potentially be used towards.  

It has been cool to learn to code in Javascript and learn how to create my first mobile app, and I hope to make further progress in the next couple weeks to make it more user-friendly and encompass the functionalities needed for the use case.  


Home page (left), camera-taking page (middle, can take photos and flip the camera), after taking a photo (right)

User confirmation for whether photo looks good (left), user input for desired filename (right)


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