About Me

I am in my third year at the University of Minnesota pursuing my bachelor’s degree in computer science and a minor in sustainability. I will be graduating Spring 2022. I am a part of the Outdoors club and ACM-W here at college. In my free time I love to bike, hike, and rock climb.

About My Mentor

Dr. Helena M. Mentis is a professor at University of Maryland Baltimore County in the Department of Information Systems. She is also the director the Bodies in Motion Lab. Dr. Mentis’ research interests include the following subjects that address the issues of imaging interaction in surgery and patient empowerment:

More information on these topics can be found here: https://userpages.umbc.edu/~mentis/

About My Project

My project for this research has been to lead our research paper. I have helped write the introduction, related work, and make sure the the rest of our study goes smoothly.

My Final Report

My Blog

Week 1 (May 18 - May 22)

During my first week of the DREU program I met with my mentor Dr. Helena M. Mentis virtually. We talked about the many projects that her lab was working on. Her research focuses mainly on the improvement of telehealth by gathering input from health profressionals about remote mentoring and interaction. She gave me an overview of these projects and let me choose one to work on that sounded the most interesting to me. She was very kind and accomodating which made me feel more comfortable. I thought the research that they were going to do with collecting surveys and interviews from health practitioners about the benefits, struggles, and new opportunities of the use of telecommunication solutions in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Week 2 (May 25 - May 29)

During my second week, I met the rest of the lab that Dr. Mentis now oversees virtually. I have never done research like this before and it was encouraging to see that everyone else was so excited to collaborate even if we were all geographically far apart. Everyone that I met during our Webex meeting were graduate or Ph. D students, so that was a bit intimidating. Even though I did not have much prior knowledge of the projects that everyone was working on, I was happy just to listen and learn about how their meetings work. It gave me a good idea of how much work goes into research collaboration.

Week 3 (June 1 - June 5)

During my third week, I got in contact with the person leading the Telehealth Surveys & Interview project, Azin. She sent me some helpful information about the basis for the study as well as training to complete. The training walked me through the research process, ethical principles, and the history that those are based upon. Once I had completed that training, during our weekly meeting as a lab on Wednesdays I was tasked with figuring out how to integrate a voice-to-text recognition to our Qualtrics survey. The survey was already created along with the questions by Azin and Ignacio who also works in the lab. After much research into the topic, I ended up calling Qualtrics IT to ask if this integration was possible, but they told me that it is not yet available. I met virtually with Azin about this and she had found a different software, Phonics, that we might be able to use after we check with the IRB approval board.

Week 4 (June 8 - June 12)

During my fourth week, I met with Azin again to go over the process of writing an introduction for a research paper. The main questions that should be answered in the introduction are: What is the problem? Why is it a problem? What are approaches that already exist for this problem? What is the approach that you plan to use? As well as a summary of our findings. She also shared some helpful resources for me to cite related work as it pertains to our project. I got to work on answering these questions about our study and read interesting papers published on the ACM-DL website. Both Azin and Ignacio gave me helpful feedback on the studies I found as well as my introduction.

Week 5 (June 15 - June 19)

During my fifth week, I worked on collecting more information on related work that has already been done on telehealth solutions. I met with Ignacio to go over our introduction and learn how to use LaTeX and Overleaf to edit our research paper. I found great resouces on the ACM-DL website again and used Zotero to cite my sources. Ignacio reviewed my sources and sent me other helpful informtion to use while writing the related works section. In this section, I aimed to answer, “What work as already been done to move along the process of introducing more technology into healthcare?” and “How does the lack of information on the topic create an opportunity for Humuan Computer Interaction (HCI) to do more research?”.

Week 6 (June 22 - June 26)

During my sixth week, I worked on finishing collecting information for the Related Work portion of our reseach paper. I continued to read the sources that Ignacio had sent me as well as looking up helpful sources online through ACM-DL. I wrote out the general structure of the section and added research to support my statements. Next week I will be submitting the paper, along with the introduction, to have other research students to review.

Week 7 (June 29 - July 3)

During my seventh week, I worked on finishing up the Related Work portion of our reseach paper. I started not knowing how to format this section, but it really helped me to look up examples and proper citations. I started by writing a template structure of what I wanted to include in the section and continued to add research and studies to back up my claims. Ignacio was able to review my paper before we submitted it for our peers to look at and gave me great feedback which helped me improve the paper. We also virtually attended a research paper workshop, where everyone reads and reviews paper submissions. We recieved high level feedback that will help make our paper easier to understand.

Week 8 (July 6 - July 10)

During my eigth week, I worked on making the revisions to our RW in our paper. People who reviewed our paper suggested that we add more about the lack on concensus on the defintion of telehealth and moving around some sections of the paper to create a storytelling aspect to our RW. I worked on that along with finding better research that has been done into the impact of telehealth before and during COVID-19 as the statistics that we have related to this are from different sources.

Week 9 (July 13th - July 17th)

During my ninth week, I worked with Ignacio to find good sources of information on telehealth uage before and during COVID-19. Ignacio and Azin are working to get people that they already know to fill out our survey and gieve feedback about it.

Week 10 (July 20th - July 25th)

During my tenth and final week, I met with my mentor to wrap up my experience. I talked about what a wonderful opportunity it has been to work with her and everyone in the lab. I was invited to stay and work on the paper and see it to submission so that I will have some form of authorship on the paper. We also talked about applying to grad school and what that process looks like. I am glad to have made such great connections through this program.