Four UCI students with faculty mentors from the UCI Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing have been awarded the 2020 Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship in Information Technology (SURF-IT).
Only 10 students are selected for the highly competitive program each year, which is done under the guidance of their faculty mentors.
SURF-IT is an opportunity for undergraduates to undertake a research project related to the Internet of Things — interconnected computing devices in everyday objects that allow them to send and receive data.
During the 10-week program, the SURF-IT fellows will gain direct experience and training in state-of-the-art facilities and techniques. Each will receive a $2,000 stipend.
At the end of the program, the students will present their research accomplishments and findings at the SURF-IT Symposium.
SURF-IT fellow research projects
The SURF-IT fellows with nursing faculty mentors are:
Yuchong Chen
Major: Math & Quantitative Economics
Project: WIoT Data Analysis for Dementia Family Caregiver Home Visit Intervention Study
Faculty Mentors: Amir Rahmani, PhD and Jung-Ah Lee, PhD
Student Peer Mentor: Anthony Park, Computer Science
Family caregivers of persons with dementia (PWD) in Orange County lack access to care information in their own language. This particularly affects Vietnamese, Korean and Latino immigrants. Consequently, they often underutilize services and tend not to seek treatment until the situation becomes a crisis.
Immigrant families of PWD are understudied and therefore less likely to receive guidance and assistance for their own health and wellness. A community health study used two interventions to monitor this population:
- A home visit program using mindfulness and caregiver education to promote mental health
- Wearable Internet of Things (WIoT) technology to monitor the resulting physiological changes
Chen’s role in this project will be to analyze the WIoT data collected during the intervention period to find and demonstrate trends and correlations in physical activity, stress, heart rate and sleep recorded by smartwatches.
Aviv Benchorin
Major: Computer Science
Project: Live Update Service for ZotCare Multi-Level IoT-Based Health Monitoring System
Faculty Mentors: Amir Rahmani, PhD, Nikil Dutt, PhD and Yuqing Guo, PhD
Student Peer Mentor: Sina Labbaf
Wearable technology has allowed for continuous collection of data, including vital signs, physical activity and environmental data. They have been used to connect underserved pregnant women in Orange County with healthcare providers who can monitor their data and identify health issues early.
Benchorin’s role in this project will be to design a live update service for mobile apps that will push these updates to a smartwatch. Doing this will enable the researchers in the long-term study to update their wearable applications remotely.
Jonathan Sugijoto
Major: Computer Engineering
Project: Smart Watches/Rings as a Predictive/Preventative for Sleep Promotion in Pregnant Women
Faculty Mentors: Amir Rahmani, PhD, Nikil Dutt, PhD and Yuqing Guo, PhD
Student Peer Mentor: Milad Asgari
Pregnant women often have sleep difficulties due to unstable hormones and other sleep disorders. As a result, they suffer from extreme mental and physical fatigue.
Sleep disorders are treatable. However, the condition needs to be recognizable in this population so it can be treated.
The goal of this project is to be able to use different vital readings of pregnant women as they sleep. The readings will be used to predict probable complications and warn of potential health issues before they become serious.
Sugijoto’s role will be to parse the data collected so far into custom readable files that can be read by programs used to predict these complications. He will also learn to use recurrent neural networks and implement them to predict methods for alleviating sleep disorders.
John Cong Le
Major: Computer Science
Project: Mobile and Webapp for ZotCare Multi-Level IoT-Based Health Monitoring System
Faculty Mentors: Amir Rahmani, PhD, Nikil Dutt, PhD and Yuqing Guo, PhD
Student Peer Mentor: Sina Labbaf
This project provides services to underserved pregnant women in Orange County by connecting them with their health providers via wearable technology and applications.
The primary focus of the project will be to develop on top of the mobile application and create a dashboard. The mobile app enables communication with study participants and allows for the collection of subjective data through questionnaires. The dashboard provides information and analysis of the participants’ data and helps them communicate and provide interventions.
Le’s role will be to design and develop the features for mobile and web platforms, UI/UX design and teamwork and large scale application development.
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