Monday: Today I worked on my poster before turning it in. I have most of the information covered, except the results section. I spent 6 hours finding the goodness metric one by one from 3 of the data I plan to analyze. Sadly, once I analyzed it, it was giving me a straight line, and that only made me mad. I tried downloading more data to see if there was any change, but nothing. I gave up and went to bed.

Tuesday: Today after my 9am-noon meeting, I worked on my poster. I took in the feedback that was given by my peers and Dr. Zafar and implemented it. It wasn’t much change, but I for sure had to increase the font, fix the images, and the title. I will be working on the results section tomorrow.

Wednesday: Today was a very stressful day. I spent an hour working on my poster, and then 5 hours trying to figure out the coding for using for loops to find the goodness metric of 9 of my captured data. Now keep in mind, each data contains 3 different source detector distance data, and within each of the 3, there are 14 data with different amplifying gains. That’s a total of 378 capture data that I need to go through! And for loops is a way to make it easier by specifying what I am looking for within each data. I plan to use that information to create three graphs (green, red, and infrared LED) for the results section to compare against the hypothesis.

Since I was still getting a straight line and my data was not making any sense, I gave up. I cried and messaged Matt about it. I told him that I gave up and I need his help with the coding. The level of stress I had was high. I just wanted to go to sleep.

Thursday: Today I had a zoom meeting with Matt right after my shift. We talked about creating a graph for my results. After a very stressful day yesterday, he finally helped me figure out the coding for my data visualization. It was a very long 2-hour meeting, especially since I was very tired from my 7am-2pm shift.

Afterwards, I had dinner and worked on my poster for about an hour. My eyeballs were hurting too much to continue looking at my laptop.

Friday: Today I worked on the results section of my poster. I made sure everything was good. Edited the poster like 6 times before sending it to my mentor. I like the poster if I’m being honest, and compared to Tuesday’s draft, this poster is a lot more admirable.

Monday: Today I worked at my job, 7am-3:30pm. It was honestly very draining today. I did not work on anything lab or coding related today. My sister and her family came over, and so I decided to just enjoy the rest of the day with them (:

Tuesday: Today I attended the “Poster Design” seminar. I actually really liked it. Dr. Anneli Joplin gave very good points on how to design our poster for the symposium. Afterwards, I had a quick zoom meeting with my mentor, who is currently at a conference in Florida. I headed to the library for about 3 hours and worked on explaining what each line of coding means. I had started on it at the beginning of week 6, but lost track of it. It wasn’t as hard as I thought. The only issues were explaining the most complex coding.

Wednesday: Today is the most productive I’ve been since week 3. I have been feeling very down since after my trip to Washington D.C. I honestly don’t want to go too deep in my personal life and mental health, but when things get too complicated and I don’t like it, I tend to shut down for a few weeks. Not just in school, but life in general. After week 3, I would work on my coding, but it wouldn’t be as fun as it was in the beginning. I’m not sure why this happens, but it does bother me.

But today, I prayed in the morning and everything has been going well ever since. I felt happy and content with the work I have done. I refreshed my memory by watching 2 for loops videos (even learned about while loops!).  I edited my abstract and sent it to my mentor. Then I finally finished explaining what each line of coding means (feels like I’ve been working on it since forever).

I gave myself a pat in the back and finished at 7pm (worked since 10am). I took my scooter and roamed around campus. Took a ton of solo pictures and went to the Rice Stadium to re-live memories from my last marching band competition in 2017 (senior year of high school). It was a beautiful day, and I enjoyed it.

Thursday: Today I re-edited my abstract. I received an email stating that the abstract has a limit of 1200 characters, and that meant shrink it even more. I spent 3 hours working on the abstract yesterday, and today I spent another 2 trying to lessen the paragraph *cries internally*. My mentor is currently busy, so I won’t know when I’ll be getting feedback from him. Possibly by tomorrow evening. Afterwards, I began working on my poster. I had so much information, but I can only put very few points, making it very hard for my overcomplicated self.

Friday: Today, at 2am, my brain decided to figure out how I’m going to add what I learned from for loops into the data we have collected. I was stressing out a few hours prior, and it only got worse as I was about to sleep (the overthinking hits me a lot at night). As soon as I got the idea, I typed it down on my phone. I added the picture examples and explained everything so I wouldn’t forget. I felt confident and knocked out right away.

I worked at my job 7am-2pm. Around noon, I received feedback from my mentor. He changed a few words and moved a few sentences around. After my shift, I went home, showered, ate, and headed over to Rice. Since Matt is on his way back from Florida, I decided to ask Rachel for help on my poster. As of now, I have spent 4 hours on it. Rachel agreed on the fact that writing the abstract and creating a poster are very hard. I then worked on my abstract for about 30 minutes. I will leave Rice at 8:30 and plan to continue working on my poster until midnight (to complete the 8hrs for today).

Monday-Friday:

Hurricane Beryl came to Houston like it had business to do! It left my area without power for 4 days! Many are still without power. I wanted to work on the for-loops assignment my mentor gave me, but I had no internet or service whatsoever. I could only make calls, barely send any messages.

Aside from that, I’m slowly recovering from the death of one of my guinea pigs, Cinnamon Roll. She was the cutest and sadly passed away on Wednesday afternoon.

I got power back Thursday night, and got service/internet back Friday night.

I worked a double Friday night and 8 hours at my job. Didn’t get to have time to do anything or catch up until Sunday evening.

Monday: Today I worked on my final presentation powerpoint and proceeded to work on one of the assignments Matt gave me. For this assignment, he wanted me to explain why I used each line of coding, and what it does.

Tuesday: Today I continued finishing up what I started on Monday. I then proceeded to work on learning the for loop in python. A for loop in python allows you to “execute a block of code a fixed number of times”. You can iterate over a sequence like a list, tuple, or string.

Wednesday: Today I did not go to Rice campus. I went to my college campus (Lone Star College) to have my one-on-one meeting with my professor. Afterwards, I continued learning about for loops.

Thursday: Independence Day!!

Friday: Day off!

Monday: Today I continued reading on implementing the goodness metric using FFT. I’ve been working on this for the longest, but that’s because I had lost motivation previously. I am good now though! I analyzed deeper in the reading and I’m finally starting to understand it. I also used chat GPT to break down and explain sections of the paper. I was really struggling to stay focused with all the words and phrases that are above my level.

Tuesday: Today I worked on implementing what I learned yesterday, uploading it to Anaconda (a computer program) and graphing it. It did not go as planned. After 4 hours of trying to figure out the right coding, I was beginning to feel very tired and decided to go home.

Wednesday: I FINALLY figured out how to find peaks using scipy! This is the step before finding goodness metric. After days of trying to figure this out, I feel accomplished. It was stressful, and it honestly brought me down. I was losing motivation. But I’m glad to know that I will be sleeping happily tonight.

Thursday: Today I focused on finding the goodness metric. It was a challenge, but not as bad as finding the peaks. I asked Rachel for help, and the fact that even she had trouble shows that coding can be hard… and she’s a computer science major!! (I am not hating on her skills). Aside from that, I had a successful day (: I found the goodness metric and calculated the heart rate. I sent my coding to Matt, and we’ll see what he says tomorrow during our meeting.

Friday (writing it on Sunday): I had my meeting with Matt and Rachel, and he was glad to know that I figured out the heart rate. He gave me two assignments, and when I was going to start working on them, I accidentally ruined my laptop.

Here’s what happened: I was going to ride my scooter to go to the Rice store, so I put my water cup in my satchel (did not take my backpack that day). Everything was fine, made sure my bag was always standing so the water wouldn’t spill. But once I arrived back at the BRC, I laid down my bag on the desk and totally forgot about it. Once I opened my bag, I see my computer in a puddle of water… I cried.

I bought a 10lb bag of rice and stuffed my laptop inside (for 2 days). I then went to Micro Center with my boyfriend and his friends, and they helped me find a new laptop (I love it!).

Monday-Wednesday: I went to Washington D.C to attend the Tech Connect Conference. It was a very great experience. I attended the CHIPS Workforce Development program seminar, which talked about the semiconductor industry and the many possible career opportunities.

I had the chance to see some friends present their posters and I also had the opportunity to speak to a research neurologist from Siena, Italy! He gave me his email and told me that if I am ever interested in sharing my research (with Matt’s approval), to just email him and we could have a zoom meeting.

I also had the very great and unique opportunity to go to the White House and speak to some federal government officials! The feds wanted to meet with us to talk about our experiences attending community college, letting them know how they could help us better in regards to getting financial support and the great idea of apprenticeships.

Thursday: I took the day off today. I responded to all of my emails, completed surveys the directors from the convention sent, and other paperwork Dr. Ashcroft sent.

Friday: I went to the City of Sugar Land Surface Water Plant today. The trip was very informative. I enjoyed the time there. After getting lunch, I continued working on implementing the goodness metric using FFT. Still a challenge.

Monday: Today I worked on computing the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) from a CSV file and selecting frequencies from 0.5 to 10 Hz. Last week I learned how to visualize data, but today I got to take the FFT of the signals, and filter data to a particular range of frequencies. I spent a good amount of time reading about the Fourier Transform and how to apply it, but it was pretty complicated. I watched videos too, but it was still confusing. I used chat GPT for some breakdown explanation and after 2 hours, I finally figured it out. Sent the graph to Matt to see if I had done it right, and he approved (:

My next steps are to identify heart rate and calculate goodness metric.

Tuesday & Wednesday: For these two days, I worked on understanding the “goodness metric”, in which it’s used as a substitute for the signal quality or signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the PPG signal obtained. For our lab, I will be using scipy.signal.find_peaks to identify heart rate and the goodness metric. I’ve also been assigned to read a paper written by our PI and fellow Rice members called “DistancePPG: Robust non-contact vital signs monitoring using a camera” (by Mayank Kumar, Ashok Veeraraghavan, and Ashutosh Sabharwal).

Thursday: I had my first meeting with our PI Ashok and other REU members. The meeting was pretty interesting. A few of the REU members talked about any problems or updates over the projects they are working on. And the PI made it VERY clear on taking lab safety precautions. Afterwards, Matt had to attend two meetings, so I stayed with Rachel (the undergrad I am working with) to work on some ideas.

Ashok told Matt to come up with a way to cover the device, so that it’s not exposed to light  because it is creating extra noise, causing our data to be wonky. So, I came up with an idea.

My idea was to get a small box and put it on top and around our device. Sadly, there were no boxes available that we could use. Rachel suggested we’d use aluminum foil, and I agreed. But I wanted to use something that goes around or on top of the device, something that will hold the aluminum foil steady. I walked around the lab and remembered that there are weigh boats. Weigh boats are used to weigh powdered solutions. So, I got the boat, covered it in foil, made a hole where the device’s cables can go through, and put it on top of the device. From there, we tapped the two opened sides of the boat to our skin. We put foil under our wrist/hand and covered it up to the cables.

I felt very proud today because for the first time since I started this program, I spoke my ideas and I knew they were going to work.

I learned something about myself today. I hate reading. I cannot concentrate on reading something that does not interest my brain. As much as I push myself to learn computer programming, my brain just doesn’t want to cooperate. But I am a creative person. Tell me to come up with a physical idea or solution, and my brain will right away put itself to work. I can create things, and I am happy that I confirmed myself with that.

Friday: For today, I continued working with scipy.signal.find_peaks. This is honestly a bit more challenging. I understand what it’s saying, but I don’t know how to implement it in the program. But I’ll figure it out.

Monday: Today I worked on testing out the phantoms that Matt created the day before, Sunday June 3^rd. I worked on it for a good 2 hours and a half. There were 6 phantoms, #21-26: 15 minutes each + 1 minute measuring the phantom size. Everything was going well until I noticed odd waves processing during one of the readings in phantom #25.

Quick explanation of the phantoms:

• Each phantom has 3 light readings: green, red, and infrared light. Each light has a total of 28 readings: 14 from Matt’s device with different amplifier gains, and 14 from the pulse oximeter. It is done to compare and see if our device’s readings accurately match the pulse oximeter. Overall, each phantom has a total of 84 readings.

The issue I had was that the BPM and SpO2 in the green light at 1M (amplifier gain) were marking ‘zero’. I deleted the data, restarted it, and I was still getting the same information. I looked at the data for the rest of the phantoms, and #24 and 26 had the same issue. I asked Rachel (an undergrad student I’m working with) for help. I ended up messaging Matt about the issue and he does not know why this happened.

Tuesday: I created 4 new phantoms today: #27-30. Matt sent me the recipe and I managed to make them by myself with no problems! I felt so proud. It did take me a good 3 hours.

• I mix the ingredients together, and that takes about 30-60 minutes depending on how many you make. You have to be very careful and precise. I then put it in a small chamber to remove the gas for 15 minutes at -29 inHg, incubate it for an hour at about 40˚C, cover it in aluminum foil and leave it on Matt’s desk overnight.

Wednesday: I did not go to Rice today. Matt suggested staying home and work on the Fourier transform readings that he assigned to me. He had a few issues to sort out with the phantoms and the data.

Thursday: Today I worked on getting data from the phantoms I created on Tuesday. I only worked on #28-30. Phantom #27 was excluded because it was very sticky, possibly due to not adding enough curing solution. Getting the data took about 2 hours. For the rest of the day, I worked on visualizing a set of data. And after 3 stressful and confusing hours, I finally did it!

Friday: I did not go to Rice again today. Matt suggested working on data visualization and analysis. Once I get that covered, I will be moving onto filtering data by selecting certain frequencies!

Here’s a picture of what I did on Monday (:

Tuesday: I had my first orientation meeting. It went quite well. I really liked how thorough Dr. Fazar and Dr. Clay were about the responsibilities of being in this program. I also did my research presentation, about my mentor’s project and what I’ll be doing this summer. I did so well! I was shocked at the fact that I didn’t stutter or panic about it! I felt so proud of myself.

Wednesday: First day working with my mentor, Matt. It went pretty well. I realized that the thing I will be struggling for sure is analyzing and visualizing data. It’s hard. I asked Matt if it’s going to be hard, and he said yes. That gave me a bit of relief in a way because at least I know that I’m not slow at understanding; it’s hard in general.

For the rest of the day, we created “Phantoms”, which are rubber-like materials Matt has developed. With the help of phantoms, we can simulate skin thickness by placing one in between our skin and the device. We want to make sure the light gets data without error before testing it on real patients. Phantoms of various sizes are created and will be used to see if the light transmitting to the skin and into the radial artery gives us accurate data when testing it on ourselves. We measure our heart rate (HR) and oxygen saturation (SpO₂).

Phantoms are created with a combination of titanium oxide, PDMS, and curing solution 😊

Thursday: Today Matt helped me collect my own data with 8 different phantom sizes and concentration. I simultaneously collected PPG signals from each wavelength (green, red and infra-red) for HR and PPG signals from red and infra-red wavelengths for SpO_2. My next steps for this upcoming weekend are to continue reading about the Fourier transform, and hopefully begin filtering data to the particular range Matt told me (0.5 to 5 Hz).

Friday: It stormed this morning, and Matt recommended me to stay home for today. But I continued with my readings of Fourier transform.