I took Engs 12, Design Thinking, my freshman winter, and fell in love with design and its methodologies. All of the TAs in the class said that the DALI Lab would be a great way to continue using those skills, so I applied and began work my sophomore fall.
My first project was helping to develop Psych on Ice, a crisis management program for astronauts coping with the stresses of long-term space flights. NASA has a crisis management program in one giant file on a hard drive, but they wanted to put it on the web so that they could track usage statistics and give a better experience to their users. My job was to recreate the decision trees and associated videos for use in a redesigned web-based Psych on Ice app.
I worked on Psych on Ice for two terms, then took a term off to focus on developing RunRite SmartSole. During that spring of 2015, I entered and won 3rd place in The Pitch, an entrepreneurship competition with the DALI Lab and the Dartmouth Entrepreneurial Network. With those funds, I re-entered the DALI lab, this time as a project manager, to further develop RunRite.
RunRite is a pressure-sensitive insert meant for runners who want to gain more quantitative data about their foot strike for injury prevention and technique monitoring. More detailed information about it can be found here, but the portion conducted in the DALI Lab hoped to take the data coming from the SmartSole and visualize it in an app.
Connecting the device via Bluetooth proved to be a significant challenge, so the main accomplishments of the time in the DALI Lab were receiving data from the device and visualizing it in a simple UI reminiscent of a Dr. Scholl's infomercial. I managed a team of three, one who designed the UI, one who connected the Bluetooth, and one who wrote the algorithm to visualize the data.