The team woke up to a gloomy morning, and after another scrumptious breakfast headed to World Hope to start working on the project. Sofía, Zavier, and Rachel communicated with the teams PI Khanjan about a ride to their meeting, and about five minutes later he scooped them from the office and headed out for the day. The three team members arrived at University of Makeni around 10 AM to join the Sickle Cell and Mothers of Sierra Leone teams in a meeting, while the rest of the team stayed back at World Hope. They were greeted by the Head of the Psychology, Health Sciences, and Nursing Department, the school’s Head of Student Affairs, and the school’s Coordinator. The teams went around the table explaining their projects, and what they aimed to accomplish for the day as public health students at the school filed in.
After some short greetings and introductions, the teams went their separate ways, and the AISHA team was escorted outside to plug in their device. They gave a ten-minute explanation of the device and all of the functions programed into AISHA. Once they were complete, the staff retreated and said they would send students their way to learn about the device and try it out. Unfortunately for the three AISHA members, there was some lack of communication between teams and all of the students were inside with the Sickle Cell team being interviewed. After about an hour, the team members asked a fellow Lehigh PI from another project to intervene.
While some members were at University of Makeni, the others were hard at work back at World Hope and visiting other health centers. Elif and Aabi visited Branda Hospital, where they demonstrated their product to the manager/co-founder of the hospital. Both parties were ecstatic about the result of the meeting; he shared his thoughts on where the device could improve and asked insightful questions about privacy and the team’s business plans. He also asked about the accessibility of their product for the rest of the country.
Eric and Omar stayed at the team’s home base where Eric started to code the back end of the Alexa device so the team could continue to build new skills, while Omar tested the current skills to ensure everything worked properly and identify any weak points. Once Aabi and Elif returned, they joined in coding pandas. With pandas, Eric, Elif , and Aabi began to code and implement Panda’s Python module for more efficient sorting, searching, and accessing health information for skills that use spreadsheets. Throughout the day, the three also learned about “DynamoDB” which is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) database. This would allow for more optimal storage of health information, data, and files for the skill.
Sofía, Zavier, and Rachel were finally able to demonstrate the Alexa device, and its capabilities to Public Health students at the University of Makeni. The team received lots of positive and valuable feedback, and quickly scurried off back to the World Hope office to prepare for a very important meeting. The three planned to meet with the District Medical Officer (DMO) the next day, alongside their PI Khanjan Mehta. After a break for dinner and some down time, the three met up with their PI to discuss plans for the meeting the next day. All team members were exhausted after a long day of hard work, and retreated back to their rooms for the night.
Team Highlights
Elif: Fried banana bread at breakfast.
Eric: Learning more about DynamoDB.
Sofía: Having another fieldwork success with a new population: university students of public health
Zavier: Getting positive feedback and approval from UNIMAK Public Health students.
Rachel: Going to UNIMAK and seeing the differences in between Lehigh University, and a university in Sierra Leone.
Omar: eating 6 meatpies in one sitting and 2 donuts as well
Aabi: Visited Branda, talked with Co-founding CEO, talked a lot about the Sierra Leonian healthcare.
Team Rating: 1.76/5