After fine-tuning my usability test materials, I sent a request to the Rice interns in Malawi to conduct an informal usability test at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Malawi. However, I had no idea about how strict administration in Malawi actually is. It looks like we need approval from the hospital director and maybe even IRB approval to conduct this test. I was thinking that I could get some general feedback on my UI designs, and PowerPoint slides and questions shouldn’t require IRB approval. But now, I know that I should probably confirm with admin whenever I need to ask people outside of Rice 360 for feedback on my work. Even though we may not be able to test people to see how well the UI conveys information and alerts, we may be able to show the UI design to a few health practitioners to see what they like/don’t like on the UI designs.

I think it’s really nice that the RRK lab encourages journal club during weekly meetings, and we’re starting to have journal club at our weekly tech team meetings as well. We present papers that are relevant to our projects. I also had a chance to prepare a journal club presentation for one of our weekly tech team meetings. I created a presentation on the paper “Kangaroo Mother Care: A review of mothers׳ experiences at Bwaila hospital and Zomba Central hospital (Malawi)”. In this paper, I looked to see how our neonatal temperature monitor (NTM) would be helpful in Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC). KMC is a natural way of caring for infants and consists of continuous skin-to-skin contact between the mother and baby. I didn’t get to present this because our meeting ran overtime, but planning for the presentation was a great experience! I think journal club is a great way to let everyone know what’s going on with their projects and also contribute to colleagues’ projects.

I also figured out how we can collect temperature data from a patient monitor on our computers. Our RS232 card finally arrived, but I was only able to collect SPO2 data via the Medicollector software since we haven’t received our temperature probes, yet. Furthermore, I figured out how to export the data collected to a text file, which can then be exported to Excel. From there, we can use Matlab to analyze the data by importing text/Excel files. So as soon as our temperature probe arrives, we should be able to begin the adult study to test the accuracy of our temperature probe in the IncuBaby temperature monitor.