Patient Health Project
Looking at the directions for writing this blog post, the first thing I noticed was the order that the two questions were written: “What am I doing?” was first, and “Why am I doing it?” was second. Whether it was by coincidence or on purpose, it is presented in the opposite order of importance to me. More important to me is why I am working on something, because the true passion I have for this field is to help a particular person or group, which is why this class intrigued me so much. The “why” in this case is that we as a group are helping our patient deal with a condition that, frankly, really sucks to deal with. The “what”, I hope, would be to create a device that senses when our patient’s blood sugar is lowering by certain chemicals released when blood sugar is dropping. Hopefully, we would be able to provide a non-intrusive way to monitor dangerous blood sugar drops during the day, qualitatively. Currently, I am researching what chemicals are produced when a blood sugar drop is occurring. The Diabetes Alert Dogs are trained to react to blood sugar drops by smell, so some sort of chemical must induce this change (“what”). I am doing this because, once the chemical is identified, we would in theory design a wearable device that could sense the presence of that chemical in close proximity to the diabetic patient to alert them when a dangerous drop is happening, rather than relaying on checking with glucose monitors.
-dan
BME Design 