Smart and Connected Health Apps: A Cross-Disciplinary Effort

Engineering undergraduates may not have full appreciation of the potential impact of technology on health care, currently one-sixth of the US GDP. Technology has a major role to play in reducing health care cost. We focus here on building smart phone apps for patients to use at home to manage their health care. This will reduce the number of patients’ visits to hospitals, length of hospital stay, and the stress of a hospital visit. Eleven teams of engineering, nursing, and arts students were brought together to develop such smart phone apps for health care. Different teams focused on different aspects of the app eco system, viz., interfacing biosensors to the smart phone, augmented reality on smart phones to help the patient visualize various procedures/exercises, and cloud-based data and trend analyses to help communicate with medical professionals and/or seek additional information online. This initial experience has helped us build an integrated ecosystem that uses only one programming language (JavaScript) that also is very popular and easy-to-learn. Future course offerings will leverage this. We hypothesize that such a transdisciplinary collaboration will not only increase awareness of health care challenges and solutions among mainstream engineering students, but also pave the way to recruit and retain women and underrepresented minority students in engineering. Social science research has shown that framing engineering tasks in terms of real-world problems and narratives would help enhance engineering identity among women and underrepresented minority student groups. The current mainstream engineering students taking this course will also benefit as they will get exposed to challenges in the healthcare industry, learn to communicate and collaborate with non-engineering majors, and apply their knowledge to solve real-world problems.