Week Two

This week Aislinn and I started working with our adviser and mentor on our research project. Once again it has been a challenging week. It was filled with many of ups and downs. Nonetheless,  I am learning a lot about research, Android Development, and time management.

On Monday we were able to pick our desk in Informatics East building. Also, Aislinn and I were also given a Microsoft Band. We have been programming small applications, and learning about the band’s SDK. Here are some pictures from this week:

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My desk in the Informatics East building

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The Microsoft Band I’ve been working with

Here are a few of tasks I worked on this week:

Downloading Android Studio 
Sunday was when all the trouble began. My only goal for the day was to properly download Android Studio onto my laptop. I had attempted to download the program a few years ago, but continuously received errors. Sunday was not much different. I spent more time than I’d like to admit googling each error. Unfortunately, around 6 o’clock I gave up for the day. Monday, I tried again. I finally google something right! I found a blog post about how Windows’ BIOS settings affects Android Studios. After a bit more googling, I found a tutorial on how to switch on the vt-x in the BIOS menu. By Monday afternoon Android Studios finally worked on my laptop!

Reading Articles
Majdah gave Aislinn and I two articles to read and summarize for Wednesday. The first article I read was titled, “Concordance of Text Message Ecological Momentary Assessment and Retrospective Survey Data Among Substance-Using Men Who Have Sex With Men: A Secondary Analysis of a Randomized Controlled Trial”. Now from the title you might be thinking: “How does that have anything to do with new mother and stress”. That is exactly what I thought, but after reading the article I realized why Majdah had asked us to read it. The article describes two surveying methods that can be used to collect data. Both of these methods we will be implementing in our applications. I enjoyed reading the results from the study, because hopefully our study will generate similar patterns in our data. The second article I read was titled, “PopTheray: Coping with Stress through Pop-Culture”.  This article had a more obvious connection to our study. The article described how smartphones could be used as a medium for therapy. I enjoyed reading both of these articles, because they gave me more insight into the topics I will be researching this summer.

Related Works & Methods Outline
This week we had to create a related works and methods outline. We attended a seminar on Wednesday that helped explain the expectations for the outline. The outline had to be written in ShareLatex. Luckily, we had Majdah’s help. By Thursday afternoon, we had finished our outline. In a week we should have a rough draft.

Running the PregnancyDiary Code
This was our biggest task for the week. Last Friday we were given the code for an application. The application was not complete yet, but had much of the EMS surveying functionality. After trying what seemed like everything, we could not get the code to run on our laptops. I kept getting a “File too long” error when trying to download the project from GitHub. This was because, Windows only allows for file names up to 250 characters. The file names in the project were much longer than that. Aislinn was able to clone the file from get hub, but she also received errors when the project was compiled. In the end, we were unable to run the code, but we decided to write a couple applications that worked with the Microsoft Band. We were able to write a Hello World app, a Heart Rate app, and a Heart Rate Notification app. Although these were part of our original goal, I enjoyed programming the applications that could work with the band. Next week we will hopefully start coding the application for the study.

All in all, I learned a lot this week. We may not have accomplished everything we had originally planned on doing, but we tried our best. I am hoping next week we will get more programming done.