With technology always evolving, health care has to adapt as well, using telehealth to reach patients who cannot easily travel to a physical clinic or hospital. A senior capstone design team in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Texas A&M University developed a new phone app to help diagnose neurological issues.
“Our application is sort of a first test to see how your vision is doing, and see if that's manifesting as a symptom of a larger issue,” Matthew Armstrong said. “Our assignment is to design something that can be deployed remotely. It's our job to narrow down the problem statement enough to a tangible opponent.”
The team worked with the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center to design a low-contrast visual acuity test. Currently, these tests take the letter test seen in any eye doctor’s office but adjust the shade of the letters. Instead of black, the letters are at 2.5 percent grayscale contrast, the standard for low contrast visual acuity testing. Grayscale letters are harder to distinguish against a white background. For certain neurological deficits, including multiple sclerosis, this eye test can help doctors diagnose conditions.
There are no versions of this test for phones, nor is there an app to test vision in this way outside of a clinic. While that put the team on the cutting edge of this type of project, it brought its own challenges as well. The team had to configure the camera app on a phone to run their program effectively, along with learning a coding system they had not used before in class.
Despite the challenges, the team celebrated milestones along the way and recognized the larger impact of their work. Joseph McMahan said their goal of changing the landscape can be easily applied to their jobs after graduation.
“I think in the long term, this will help significantly improve our skills when we go into the workforce, because we have a different mindset going in,” McMahan said. “We can say, ‘Hey, why don't we try approaching it this way, which has never been done before.’ It gives us that motivation and that insight, as opposed to sitting down and going through the same old scenarios.”
Other team members, including Andrew Purnadi and Austen Kaul, agreed that the two-semester project prepared them well for life after graduation.
“We come up with our own deadlines, we have to come up with our own plan,” Purnadi said. “Having to plan out everything and to essentially take charge of the project is a really good experience since we're about to enter the workforce.”
“Careers don't end in a semester,” Kaul said. “You don't do your three months of it, and then say, ‘Okay, well, I got my grade in this class and I’m done.’ No, your job is your job and you're going to stick to it until the design is actually finished.”