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J.D. DeFreese (defreese@email.unc.edu) UNC Exercise and Sports Science
Drug Education Project
We are seeking to develop a web-based application for drug education within the athletic department. This would be an online education tool using both motivational-interviewing and personalized feedback-based techniques to provide substance use education via this software tool. We would be able to provide the content for the module but need help with the programming aspects. An important function would be for the program to take user inputted data about their last 2 weeks of behavior to create real-time feedback for the user (e.g., the amount of drinks reported is equivalent to this number of calories, this amount of money, etc.) Users should be able to print or have access to a PDF of their data-driven feedback. We are hoping it can be integrated with the athletic departments communication application, Teamworks, and be windows-based. We would also like it to be able to log participant completion, be able to catalogue participant responses in an Excel format, and separate participant completion (identifiable) from participant data (identifiable) so that responses could be reviewed anonymously and in aggregate format only by administrators. Ultimately, we’d welcome discussion about feasibility but would like this to be as user-friendly an application as possible.
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Jackie Zeeman (jackie_zeeman@unc.edu), UNC School of Pharmacy
Time Logger for Pharma PhD Activities
The ideal time logging and feedback application would be compatible with commonly used systems (e.g., mobile phones, Macs, PCs, tablets, etc.); allow for time logging to occur at any time and/or location; capture multi-tasking and/or activities occurring for <30 minutes; provide on-demand individualized time-use summary reports; integrate the time use prediction and time use reflection activities into the time logging instrument; and, provide a database of all submitted time log activities to be used for research and educational program improvement purposes.
Background – The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) Eshelman School of Pharmacy launched a redesigned doctor of pharmacy (PharmD) curriculum in Fall 2015. Because no research had been done on student academic time use in the existing curriculum, faculty engaged in redesigning the curriculum had to make key assumptions regarding the amount of time students would spend engaged in academic activities (e.g., attending class, studying). To make explicit those assumptions, and to establish an empirical baseline for further study, a time use exercise was developed and administered to PharmD students. This project has been motivated by four goals: (1) to assess the academic time demands of a new curriculum; (2) to promote student self-assessment, self-awareness, and self-efficacy; (3) to evaluate the effectiveness of this intervention for, motivating interest in, and helping students improve their academic time management; and (4) to establish baseline data for the School and pharmacy education.
In previous administrations of the time-use exercise, PharmD students completed three key activities: (1) time use prediction, (2) time logging, and (3) time use reflection. Students predicted, logged, and reflected on their time use in nine predefined categories. In efforts to capture individual data for all students, the time use prediction and time use reflection exercises were built utilizing Qualtrics surveys while the time logging instrument was built utilizing Microsoft Excel. Students were required to individually submit each activity of the time-use exercise. Upon submission of the completed time use prediction Qualtrics survey and time use reflection Qualtics survey, each student received an automatically generated copy of his or her individual submission via email. Upon submission of the completed time log Excel instrument, students received instructions on how to access their individualized time-use summary reports. These reports were automatically generated as students completed their time log; however, instructions on how to access these reports were not shared until after the conclusion of the time log period in efforts to reduce potential biases associated with visually monitoring one’s time use.
Strengths of the current Excel-based time logging instrument:
Limitations of the current Excel-based time logging instrument:
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Heather Wasser (wasser@email.unc.edu) UNC Nutrition, School of Public Health
Infant Nutrition App/Site
For several years, I have had an idea for a website and/or app that provides parents and caregivers with scientifically-based advice on infant feeding. The website/app would be organized around infant and toddler stages of development, e.g. newborn, supported sitter, independent sitter, crawler, etc. It would provide information on children's eating skills at that particular stage, types of foods to feed, sample "menus" and recipes, and strategies for feeding in a responsive manner. I've attached the document that initially formed the basis for this idea. It was published in 2004 by the American Academy of Dietetics, now the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, with a promise that educational materials and platforms would ensue. While the science underpinning this review was excellent (it needs updating and I would guide that), the initial project was funded by Gerber. Gerber of course used this research to provide parents infant feeding information based on developmental stage, but as you can imagine, it guides them to their commercial products:
https://www.gerber.com/why-gerber/the-gerber-nutrition-journey
We have several research projects in which we could use a non-commercial, evidence-based infant feeding website/app upon development. I am a registered dietitian and lactation consultant and expert in the area of infant nutrition and feeding. I would guide the students in all aspects of content.
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Tessa Joseph-Nicholas (tnicholas@cs.unc.edu) UNC Computer Science
IDEAhub Social Media Collection & Analysis Suite
A team of UNC-CH faculty and students based in the Digital Innovation Lab (http://digitalinnovation.unc.edu/) seeks a team of COMP 523 students to help develop a series of proof-of-concept demos of smart, flexible social media mining, analysis, and visualization methods adaptable to research questions across the disciplines. The ultimate goal is to offer the tools we develop in a free web application, designed to be accessible and useful to a general, interdisciplinary audience. Aspects of the project have already been developed in Python and JavaScript, but 523 students' contributions can be tailored to their specific skills and interests. All code generated will be offered freely on GitHub under Creative Commons licensing; all members of the development team will be credited for their work.
Initial efforts will explore activity around questions of the efficacy and safety of vaccines on Twitter, Facebook, and the WebMD message boards. Therefore, we hope to gather data around keyterms and hashtags such as #vaxxed, #vaccineswork, and #vaccineinjury from these platforms and analyze them in an attempt to answer questions about—among other things—the rhetorical strategies used by individuals on both sides of this debate; the online proliferation of both useful information and “fake news” around vaccines, and how users appear to distinguish between them; and areas of crossover between beliefs about vaccine safety and efficacy and other sociopolitical positions. We have already made some progress mining Twitter data but hope to improve our existing methods and add methods that provide textual data and metadata from Facebook and WebMD. We also plan to create a series of interactive exploratory data visualization tools to allow users to explore our datasets; we’ve developed one such tool using the d3.js library, and we hope now to extend the depth and breadth of those efforts by incorporating larger, more representative datasets and improving the functionality, variety, and usability of the visualization tools.
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Linda Green (greenl@email.unc.edu) UNC Math
Planet Casson Math Game
There is a math problem that I teach that I call Planet Casson. On Planet Casson, there is a network of canals, and the rest of the planet is solid land. (Each land mass is “disk-like”, i.e., has no holes in it.) The society that lives on Planet Casson wants to improve their transportation system, so that each land mass has one passenger boat that circumnavigates it, in the counterclockwise direction. Since the canals are narrow, there is no space for two boats to pass each other. Is is possible to do this (a) for a given network of canals, and (b) for a network of canals that the user designs?
I would like students to be able to experiment with (a) some given networks, and (b) networks that they themselves create. They should be able to move each boat to a starting position and specify how fast each boat is traveling (possibly via sliders). Then they should be able to push go and watch the boats circumnavigate their respective land masses on the canals, and see if there are any crashes. Then they should be able to try again. Alternatively, instead of having each boat go at constant speed and watching the animation, there could be a manual mode, in which students can manually drag boats, one at a time, bit by bit in the counterclockwise direction while the other boats stay still for a moment, and see if they can avoid crashes this way. When doing (b) networks of canals that they themselves create, there has to be some way of drawing a graph (line segments that meet at vertices) on the sphere to create the network of roads.
I see this as an app for the computer or phone or iPad, etc. If (b) is too difficult, having a few simple preset networks for (a) will suffice.
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Linda Green (greenl@email.unc.edu) UNC Math
Teaching schedule checker
I am involved in scheduling faculty and especially grad students (also called TA’s) to teach and assist for classes each semester.
When I make initial assignments, and every time I make updates, I have to check that the schedule satisfies various requirements:
Ideally, the schedule also satisfies the following criteria as much as possible
I would like to be able to input the required information about the Faculty / TA hours, preferences, course conflicts, etc. and input a proposed schedule, and get an output of the requirement errors and the lesser criteria errors. That way, every time I make changes in the schedule (which is usually over 30 times ), I don’t have to make these checks by hand. If it is possible, it would be super cool to also have a program actually make the initial assignments, but this requires a more complex algorithm. Ideally, input should be in the form of a spreadsheet , for the most part, since there are about 30 faculty members and over 50 TA’s and it would be laborious to enter that all into a form interface by hand.
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Lesley Hall (Lesley.Hall@unchealth.unc.edu) UNC School of Medicine
Vaccination Translation Application
Client: Amy Liu, MD, MPH, Assistant Professor, General Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, UNC School of Medicine (w/support from the Center for Health Innovation)
Background/Problem Statement
UNC Health Care gives a lot of vaccines and has a sizeable amount of international and non-English speaking patients. When patients present with vaccination information in a language other than English, it is difficult and time consuming to translate the names of the vaccines in order to get an accurate picture of which vaccines have already been given in the home country. (see link for example of an online tool that some providers currently use: http://www.immunize.org/vis/vis_chinese.asp).
Goal
Develop an app to make the translation of vaccines an easier process. For example, can a smart phone be used to take a picture of the word, determine which language it is in, and translate it? Or can a clinician input the English word for the vaccine and the translated word be displayed in the correct language? Perhaps the app could also link to additional information regarding the vaccine in the desired language.
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Lesley Hall (Lesley.Hall@unchealth.unc.edu) UNC School of Medicine
Cost-Estimator Decision Matrix Automation
Client: Kim Anderson, Brenda Newman, Revenue Cycle Pre-Services (w/support from the Center for Health Innovation)
Background/Problem Statement
As the US health system continues to shift more and more towards consumerism, price transparency is becoming more in demand by patients. The UNC Health Care System uses a cost-estimator tool built into their current Epic platform to help produce out-of-pocket cost estimates to patients when requested. However, the UNC health care system, as a large, multi-site, academic medical center is very complex and there are numerous permutations of various inputs that are needed to generate the estimate using the tool. The UNC HCS revenue cycle team has developed a tip sheet (referred to as the “matrix”) to help simplify the decision making process for the staff that have to generate the estimate. The matrix is actually a 70+ page document that outlines what to use for the input fields for 17 different patient care scenarios. Currently only a few staff members in a limited number of clinical areas are using the tool and thus able to provide out-of-pocket cost estimates.
Goal
Build an application that would automate the matrix in a way that simplifies the discernment needed by staff to properly generate an out-of-pocket cost estimate so that the tool can be more widely used by staff throughout the health care system? If successful, the app may serve as the engine for a consumer-facing tool that would live on the health care system’s webpage.
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Jamie Cavanaugh (jamie_cavanaugh@med.unc.edu) UNC School of Medicine
Exam Room Availablity App
The UNC Internal Medicine Clinic is a large clinic with approximately 115 providers (residents, attendings, advanced practice providers) serving 12,500 patients per year. Our clinic is located in the Ambulatory Care Center and has 34 clinic rooms (attached map of the space). We are spending a lot of time managing room availability. We have to manually tracking provider time away from clinic and then process requests for add-on clinic through a manual review of availability. We would like to automate the process to be able to see real time room availability (something like Open Table for clinic rooms).
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David Stotts (stotts@cs.unc.edu) UNC Computer Science
COMP 523 Admin tools
There is a cubic metric boatload of stuff to collect and generate in order to find, organize, and manage COMP 523 clients and projects. I need a web-based system that will collect, maintain, and present these various types of information in order to create and manage the COMP 523 class in a more timely and convenient manner.
a) Client and project information. We need to collect client information and information about project ideas. This segment should gnerate a web page with a summary of all project proposals with all relevant links embedded (word docs, PPTs, web sites, etc.). Clients will be indentified by name, organization/department, email address. This section will also provide clients with an explanation of the process of proposing, as well as an explanation of client obgligations once a project is selected. We want clients to fill out this information themselves via the web interface.
b) Team scheduling. Students will be able to select prefereces from the web description of project ideas. Teams will be formed to maximize (as much as practical) student matches.
Unselected projects will remain in the database for use in following semesters.
c) Team management. This section allows the instructor to enter grades and evals for each
milestone a team must reach. It will be viewable by individual team (protected somehow).
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Wanda M. Bodnar (wanda_bodnar@unc.edu) UNC Environmental Science
A very useful tool for researchers like me would be an app that helps us find new collaborators. A “Collabor-App” (students can come up with a better name) would be like a dating app (Match, eHarmony, etc.) with a touch of LinkedIn or ResearchGate. Participants would complete a survey and be able to search for potential collaborators based on keywords such as areas of interest, expertise, skills, instrumentation, archived samples, etc.
There is similar called Collabfinder: http://collabfinder.com/
I don’t have a Facebook account, so I’m not sure I could use it. I would prefer to have something local within UNC or the North Carolina region. Networking is great if you happen to meet the right people. For those who don’t get out much or are not very outgoing, finding collaborators can be challenging.
There might be some aspect of this that will mine other DBs as mentioned (LinkedIn eg.).
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Janelle Bludorn (janelle_bludorn@med.unc.edu) UNC School of Medicine
With some in the medical community drawing comparison between point of care ultrasound (POCUS) to the advent of the stethoscope in the 1800s, medical educators are scrambling to efficiently and effectively incorporate instruction of this technology in the foundational and clinical phases of the medical curriculum. The UNC Physician Assistant Program has successfully piloted integration of POCUS into the gross anatomy course; their innovative anatomy-POCUS curriculum has been presented internationally. As medical schools nationwide are developing or adopting similar curriculum, a common theme arises: frustration over the lack of high-quality, well-designed, and transportable educational adjuncts that serve as a reference for faculty and facilitate self-directed learning among medical students.
That is why I propose the development of a mobile application called AnatUS, to be utilized by medical faculty and learners when POCUS is integrated into anatomy courses. The basic version of this app would include a list of fundamental POCUS scans. Once a scan is selected, a split screen would appear, revealing a preview of three different screens: 1) scanning technique (i.e. how to position the ultrasound probe and select proper settings to obtain ideal image) 2) ultrasound image (i.e. screenshots or video clips demonstrating ideal ultrasound images, which the option for key anatomical structures to overlie the image or video) and 3) cadaver image (i.e. images of the same anatomical structure from cadaver models). Once any of these three split screens were selected (swiped), a more in-depth, full-screen overview of the respective content would be made available to the user. (See below for very rough sketches).
A more advanced option that could be added to the basic version of the app is functionality allowing students to upload or log their scans into the app for faculty review, incorporating the possibility of an assessment aspect.
With the widespread adoption of point of care ultrasound in medical education, this app could fill a niche that is currently vacant. If done well, it is possible that it could be widely marketable across the medical education sector.
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Jared Vicory (jared.vicory@kitware.com) Kitware, Inc.
Slicer-Salt S-reps GUI
A GUI is needed to allow users to control the fitting of the anatomic object model called s-reps to target surfaces, to visualize the results, and to produce statistics of such models is needed. The underlying fitting and statistics programs already exist. The GUI must work within and in the style of the large web-resident system for medical image display and analysis called 3D Slicer. The GUI will be available for use to users around the world who want to use anatomic object shape in diagnosing diseases, studying disease processes, and extracting objects from medical images.
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Rui Wang (wrlife@cs.unc.edu) UNC Computer Science
Throat surface reconstruction pipeline
A series of separate programs now allow us to input video frames of examinations of the throat for throat cancer and produce a textured surface of the throat. These programs require the formation of the series into a single sequence not normally visible to the user as well as a GUI for visualization and control. The GUI would permit improved radiation treatment of throat cancer.
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Tong Zhu (tong_zhu@med.unc.edu) UNC Radiation Oncology
Endoscopography through radiation treatment planning pipeline
The textured surface of the throat produced from a video examination needs to be combined with an already existing program that allows the user to specify cancerous regions on the throat reconstruction and another already existing program for transferring that region into the space of a CT examination of the same patient. This region needs then to be brought into the commercial radiation treatment planning software for forming the tumor information from the CT and from the user-drawn surface regions. This tool would permit improved radiation treatment of throat cancer.
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Julian Rosenman (rosenmju@med.unc.edu) UNC Radiation Oncology
Endoscopography to 3D printer software
3D textured surfaces that are bent tubes with notable bumps and ridges and with holes need to be 3D printed. The driving problem is that videos of colonoscopic examinations screening for cancer are reconstructed into the colon surfaces with 3D geometry and texture. A simple interface that will allow us to print on a variety of 3D printers is needed. This tool would be broadly useful but in the driving application would contribute to research in improvement of the diagnosis of cancer and pre-cancer in the colon.
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Arlene Chung (arlene_chung@med.unc.edu) UNC School of Medicine
Our PCORI-funded CCFA (Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America) Patient Powered Research Network is really interested in having a very simple mobile app developed to help participants answer survey questions (would link out to the portal platform that runs this) and potentially seeing their data (we currently collect wearable device data and survey data). All our data and our platform are hosted at UNC through the Center for GI Disease and Biology so internal. This is a citizen scientist project where patients are our partners in data collection, research idea generation, and work with us throughout all parts of the research life cycle and has over 15000+ members.
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Diane Pozefsky (pozefsky@cs.unc.edu)
Vocal Email Assistant (Android App)
I am looking for an email (gmail specifically) reading app for Android. Specifically, I want to be able to process my email without looking at or touching the phone -- voice only. Specific functions that I want:
I'm quite sure that there could be a lot more complexity added, but I'm looking to be able to process 80% of my mail, not 100%.
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Wiltshire, Tim (timw@unc.edu) UNC School of Pharmacy
Not sure if any of these ideas are the sorts of things you might look at, but I’m happy to talk any of this over by email, or on the phone if there are ideas her that can be developed.
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Mike Aguilar (maguilar@email.unc.edu) UNC Economics
Financial Market Modeler
Goal: Increase understanding of financial market behavior
Target Audience: Students and researchers
Sponsor: Quantitative Financial Economics (QFE) program in UNC-CH Economics
Delivery mechanism: Web-based app on http://qfe.web.unc.edu/
Motivating Question: How should my portfolio have been allocated if I forecasted returns & (co)variances correctly?
My vision for how the app would work:
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Robert Schrewsbury (bob_shrewsbury@unc.edu) UNC School of Pharmacy
Thanks for sending out information about your course. I was thinking about something I would love to do just yesterday, so the timing is great. But I just don’t have the time (and probably the expertise) to carry it out. But here’s my idea.
I have an open-source website that is used for my compounding courses in the pharmacy school here, but has become an international site with about 40% of all hits from outside the US. It’s pharmlabs.unc.edu. Within that site, I have probably 800 test/exam/quiz questions that come from the site information and the textbooks I have written to compliment the site. And then I have probably another 1000 or 2000 questions that aren’t on the site but cover the same material.
Several years ago, I wrote an “exam program” in ColdFusion that had two parts. One part was a “data entry page” for adding new questions to the test bank – accessible to the instructor only, and had buttons to “turn on” or “turn off” the exam program. The other part was the “test page” which randomly would pull questions from 17 different categories of questions. So everyone’s exam was different (much like the Examsoft software the school is currently promoting). At the completion of the test, the student score would be displayed to the student, and an email to the instructor of the student’s results (score, categories of questions asked, etc). would be sent automatically.
Fast forward to today – what would such a “help tool” or “study tool” or “I waited to the last minute to study tool” look like and need to be to engage students of today? I’m thinking of two applications, but that’s just my limitations – one would be a “study tool” that students could use to check their understanding of material. But most students probably would not use that function very much (because they have other things to do). The other would be an “exam tool” with a much more elaborate output scheme but would need to be useful world-wide (or as world-widely as possible).
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Robert Hubal (hubal@email.unc.edu) UNC School of Pharmacy
We have some work in the Center for Innovation in Pharmacy Simulation that might be relevant for your students. One main project involves developing a virtual patient platform, and there are a number of small-ish assignments we could incorporate, including developing a rule editor tool, linking with mobile sensing devices, and integrating a cognitive modeling program. Fyi, we use the Unity game engine.
My colleague Jerry Heneghan may have other ideas as well for other projects in the center.
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Patrick Mateer (patrick@sealtheseasons.com) Seal the Seasons, Inc.
Local Farm to Local Table
Seal the Seasons believes local food is better for eaters, our planet, and our communities. We partner with local family farms to freeze, market, and sell locally grown frozen produce year round. Our B-Corp business is building a local-food brand name that emphasizes transparency, traceability, and authenticity in conventional , natural, and club grocery channels. We currently serve 750 points of distribution located between Atlanta and Washington DC with local North Carolina grown produce. Our business is currently in a growth phase – we will begin selling New York and New Jersey grown produce in the next 90 days.
We are looking for a dedicated group of students to help us increase the transparency of our brand through digital storytelling. We want to share with consumers what specific farm their food comes from and stories from these farmers. We want to capture consumer information and push out farm updates throughout the year. The farmer’s market isn’t the only place our consumers can connect from farms and have authentic relationships. Consumers that buy local seal the seasons brand should feel the same emotional benefit those get from supporting local farmers at the farmers market.
To increase our transparency we need to improve our website. Primarily we want to create a way for consumers to enter lot information found on our packaging into our website, then have the website display for the consumer which farm that lot came from. The website could also display that farms location on a map, show a picture of the farmer, and also tell about that farmers story. It might also link to the farms own website, display a farmers facebook feed, or display a farm interview done by seal the seasons earlier that season. As a company we already have internal lot tracking and all backend information. We need a front end built out.
In addition, it would be extremely helpful to capture consumers’ emails so that we could send updates on the farmer their food came from. We want the website to be able to capture consumer emails after they view a farmer (and have the website tell us what farmer was viewed). We could then distribute farm updates through a traditional consumer engagement email service.
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Megan Plenge (mfplenge@email.unc.edu) UNC Geological Sciences
I would like to have an online/app version of a paper-and-pencil assessment I use in my class. I have poked around the internet to see if something like this exists, but I have not yet been able to find it. Here’s what I do currently: Students in my lecture class use a scratch-off scantron form for quizzes, something like a lottery ticket. These forms have a star under one of the answer choices (see attached picture). I like these quizzes because: (a) The students get to leave the quiz knowing the correct answer, and (b) they are graded based on the number of attempts it takes for them to achieve the correct answer: If they get it right on the first try: 3/3 points; right on the 2nd try: 2/3 points, right on the 3rd try: 1/3 points. Online quiz platforms I’ve seen can give feedback to students, but I have not found one where the score is based on the number of attempts to get the correct answer- typically, the student has to take the entire assessment again (and then just the total assessment results are averaged).
What I would love to have is an application or a quiz platform that will allow me to