Behavioral Research Methods and Statistics

Spring 2010

I created and co-taught the graduate course Behavioral Research Methods and Statistics for Spring 2010.  The media lab has a lot of great ideas and I wanted to encourage students to critically analyze how they design their research to best learn about the effect of their ideas.

The class web page can be viewed here.

Presentations 2009

Speaker for Bank of America, Customer Service Summit. “Using Emotions to improve service”. February 3, 2009. Charlotte, North Carolina

Keynote Speaker for the SPD Foundation 9th International Symposium. “Taking Away the Guesswork:Objective Measurement of Internal State During Occupational Therapy”. October 8-10,2009. Chicago, Illinois.

Keynote Speaker for Think, Create, Engineer. “The Power of Being a Creative Engineer”.  October 29-Novermber 1, 2009.  Karnataka, India.

Measureable results for Occupational Therapy

Winter 2009- Spring 2009 with Dr. Lucy J. Miller and Dr. Rosalind Picard

Working with the SPD Foundation, I experimented with how our sensors can work with Occupational Therapists.

I tested our sensors vs. their gold standard sensors and then made observations on how the children's Electrodermal Activity changed while in therapy.

One child got extremely nervous everytime he had to speak into a microphone, but bowling and drinking water made him calm way down.

Another child would go into sparadic shifts with his EDA going way below normal and then way above normal.

While these observations in themselves do not lead to conclusions, they helped me develop a thesis topic and also to observe how functional our sensors are.

I appreciated this project because the therapists I was working with were excited (even more than I was). They had so many questions they wanted answer, they dreamt about how the technology could be used. Instead of forcing an awkward solution, I was providing means for therapists to answer their own questions.

Ecuadorian Organic Farmer Volunteer

Summer 2008

What would you do if you were about to jump into 6 years of MIT? I have always had a passion for working with the developing world, but I never lived directly there for a long period of time. So over the summer I lived in Ecuador, volunteering on an organic farm in the middle of the amazon and traveling all around. Check out my blog of my adventures.

Through this experience my whole concept of w"helping people" flipped around. In a lot of ways the Ecuadorians can help us more than we can help them.

And taking showers in rivers, hunting guinea pig, and lifting rocks has its own enlightening qualities.

Visit my web page to find out more: http://ewondering.blogspot.com/

Repairing Medical Equipment in Africa

Spring 2008

Power Point Presentation

Business Plan

After visiting Africa over break, I had to a chance to ask Dr. Jackson, CEO of Project: CURE what I, a motivated engineer, could do to help build a stable infrastructure in Africa. Dr. Jackson proceeded to tell me how Project: CURE leads the non-profit medical industry by donating over 40 million dollars of medical equipment to Africa each year. That said, no economy in Africa exists medical equipment when it inevitably breaks. All across the continent, a broken health monitor is doorstop. Equipment that determines whether people live or die, is sitting in the clinic’s closets. Furthermore, the few people who know to fix medical equipment (rarer than even doctors) are transported out of the country through brain drain. Currently, the best way to fix a broken piece of equipment is to hope to get a new one donated soon. This is how I started my long term partnership with Project: CURE, dedicated to fixing a simple problem, no organization in Africa is keeping the medical industry sustainable. As Dr. Jackson puts it, “Repairing Medical Equipment in Africa is the number one problem that needs to be addressed today”.