Journal
Final Project Report
Patient Medication Self-Management Mobile Application Lan August 9th, 2011
Week 10
The last week of the program came all too quickly. Most of the week was spent tidying up last bits of to-dos for the project. Towards the beginning of the week, I spent some time meeting up with a graduate student of Dr. Camp's and went over the progress I had made over the summer and how best we would continue on with our work for future. Also, work on the paper continues onwards. Lan August 27th, 2011
Week 9
This week, most of the time was spent on wrapping up the project at hand. Much of the time was spent on cleaning up the existing code base as well as completing documentations. Once documentations for the code are all in order, I began concentrating on completing the required final paper. Since much of the time for the project was spent on coding, I had quite a bit of reading to do in order to write a complete paper. Search was done on numerous articles pertaining to the idea of senior medication adherence related topics. After relevant papers were found, I began reading into the topics and sketching out the skeleton of the paper. By the end of the week, I had the final paper outlined and met with my mentor to further discuss the necessary contents and structure of the paper. She gave plenty of useful insights into how to write a scientific paper. This paper has been a challenge because I have never before written a scientific paper like this before, thus the writing is going at a slower pace than use to. Lan August 9th, 2011
Week 8
For the 8th week, majority of the time was dedicated to fixing bugs from the week's past. The alarm system is again further solidified. Possible user interface improvements were suggested by fellow coworkers then implemented afterwards. Since majority of other REU students are finishing up their final week at Indiana, we were all invited to a closing luncheon/final poster session on Friday. We drove to the Indianapolis campus and gave our presentations to professors and other researchers. Having another chance to practice presentation skills was very useful. In comparison to the Ohio conference, this second poster conference went much more smoothly. I was better at engaging the listener and felt a lot more confident when asked tough questions regarding the project. Lan August 9th, 2011
Week 7
Towards the beginning of the week, a bit more work went into making the content provider behave correctly. By the early part of the week, it finally began works as expected. Then onwards for the rest of the week, I finally started concentrating on the alarm aspect of the application that I have been neglecting for a while. Though the ultimate goal for the reminder is that it will be capable of coalescing similar reminders into a single pop up interruption, for the first round, it will simply create a pop up dialog for each individual reminder created. By the end of the week, the alarm system is in place, but the pop up dialog is in its preliminary stages. Besides putting the alarm system in place, some work also went into modifying the user interface for a more uniform look for the application. The beautifully created icons for the main menu page are all thanks to my cowork Suzanne Lien who was gracious enough to help me out. I've included a few screen shots of the application so far. Lan July 25th, 2011
Week 6
This week, I continued on implementing the content provider for database access of the application. Once that task was complete, I began working on creating a research poster for the SROP conference that I attended that weekend. Much preparation was done in helping to get students ready for the conference. We had mock poster presentations the day before the conference which was helpful in becoming comfortable in that environment. On Friday morning, we drove to Ohio State where the conference took place and by that afternoon, we were doing our poster presentations. The conference gave students plenty of opportunity to hone our presentation skills to a wide range of audiences from people in our respective areas of study to people outside of it. I am glad to have been presented with this opportunity to present my project as well as learning about all the interesting projects that other undergraduates are conducting from all over the country. Lan July 18th, 2011
Week 5
Though the overall structure of the application is more or less in place, there are a lot of work to be done. During the fourth week, I mostly worked on restructuring the code for the application. A major refactoring of the code was in order that once the user has created a reminder form, all the information will be stored when the application has been exited and returned to the user when the application is launched again. I spent much of the time searching for different ways of approaching this problem and finally decided upon using Android's content provider class for storage and retrieval of database information across multiple activities within the application. During the middle of the week, I had a meeting with my mentor regarding the direction of the application. We decided upon solving the issue of coalescing the reminders users create to minimize application interruption through the use of a potential scheduling algorithm. Lan July 18th, 2011
Week 4
During the beginning of the week, much of the time was spent on cleaning and refactoring the codes written. Once that was done, I went back to paper and pencil and began creating mockup drawings for what the user interface should look like for the next set of functionalities to implement. The target was to create tabs for tracking all of the medications that the user have and one that would list a set of medications that the user would be consuming throughout the day. Once the time that was set for the medication to be taken is reached, a dialog will appear for the user to confirm that they have indeed taken the drug then. By the end of last week, the overall structure for the medication identifier/reminder is in place. Lan July 6th, 2011
Week 3
This week, I mainly focused on refining what I’ve done the week before. Last week was a trial period, therefore much of what came together was just experimentation. There was a lot to improve upon. This week, I was able to clean up the UI a great deal. By the end of the week, the “pill identification” portion of the application is mostly working the way it is suppose to. Though it is still in its early stages, the application can now be used to filter through a self-created database of pills, and then once the correct pill has been identified, users can create a reminder for the pill. The reminder is then automatically entered into the “reminder” tab of the application. Lan June 27th, 2011
Week 2
After solidifying the design of the application, this week, I began programming in Android. At first, it took a little while to get use to the SDK and learning to code the layout in xml, but after reading through useful tutorials and documentations on the Android developer site, things started to become clearer. The first feature I set out to implement is the pill identification feature. Though this feature will definitely go through several iterations, I began by creating the identifier through user inputing the pill's imprint, shape, and color features.Through these, we filter the database. It was the first time that I worked with SQLite database. I found an incredibly useful tutorial that helped me understand and code the database portion of the application. Not only is the tutorial useful in understanding basic database coding in Android, it is extremely helpful in understanding how to work with different types of layouts, how to switch between activities, and many other basic skills to know when programming in Android. Lan June 19th, 2011
Week 1
The first week went pretty well. Monday was the first time when we met our mentors. The day consist of orientation of the campus, then a quick orientation of the informatics lab. All the REU students participated in a group meeting regarding what the summer research should be about. On Tuesday, I had lunch with my DREU mentor Dr. Camp and my graduate mentor. We got to know each other a little bit and had a great discussion about the project. For the rest of the week, I began brainstorming about what the overall application will look like in the end and picturing how seniors will be using it. I did quite a bit of research into interface design for seniors as well as the issues that surrounds non-medication adherence and what are the consequences of that. Though I was eager to start programming, I refrained myself from doing that. Instead, for the first week, I focused on the design aspects of the application and how to narrow the issue of non-medication adherence so that the application serves a specific purpose. By Friday, I presented my ideas to Dr. Camp and discussed with her how to feasibly finish this project in the allotted time period. We looked at the bigger picture of the project and narrow the scope while retaining the most important aspects of the application. Lan June 19th, 2011