Created 08/18/2017 at 2017:03PM

The end of summer snuck up on me between the weeks, and this is my final day at Anne Arundel's SAIL center, the James and Sylvia Earl Simulation to Advance Innovation and Learning Center. I am quite grateful for all that I have learned this summer, and the opportunities to witness the barriers towards implementing and creating new technologies in the medical field.

The operating room, the medical field are galaxies away from a traditional computer science work environment. Emails to surgeons must be composed to be short as possible. Unlike the a tech startup, you don't have access to the newest or most UX friendly equipment, with email inboxes that are capped at 100MB, Excel spread sheets in place of databases, with "find and search" operations instead of regrex. But even with additional challenges of using technology, the medical staff work tirelessly to give the highest quality of care. Each person is dedicated to serving patients, whether through research and data analysis or direct clinical work.

I'm not sure how the scapel compares to the humble keyboard, but both unearth volumes of knowledge, patterns, and direction. As I started to analyze the data from the questionnaires, and the code the communication patterns (labeling each utterance, action as something meaningful, such as a "Manage" or a "Agree" command), it was really quite amazing to see the potential impacts of telestration in the operating room for communication ease.

Even with a rudimentary telestration program that only allowed people to more or less transform their hand into a touchless laser pointer, the position of an outstretched hand positioned mapped to a green dot on the video screen, it was quite fascinating to see that there were changes in communication patterns.

While we are still in the process of completing data analysis and reviewing the patterns, mining data for statistically significant results - this summer internship has been rewarding and meaningful.

Sometimes during research it was hard to see the results, the benefits of any of the hard work after repeated days of hard work and little movement forwards. But it's part of the process, and I've had to remind myself many times that continuing to do my best was all I could do, and to look back, and be reminded of how much progress has already been made so far.

This has definitely been one of my busiest, most immersive summers. I've had the opportunity to assist in the design, recruitment of study participants, data collection, and the first of the data analyses. There are many lessons that I am taking away from my DREU experience, in addition to the confidence that I have the ability to eventually lead a scientific investigation and research project. I look forward to continue working in research, and am excited for what is to come.