Senior Project Ideas 2015

I'm a senior and a Computer Science major at the University of Utah. We have to complete a senior project to graduate. Here I list some of the ideas that I have:

1. Diabetes Manager (Preferred Project)

Possible idea for architecture

    University of Utah Medical gave us many suggestions for useful applications. It’s exciting because they have real problems to which they want to see real solutions. They’d be involved and invested into the project. They’d be contributing time, talent and resources. They could help us define what the app will do.

    The main projects discussed were health management tools; software that will help inform patients and help them individualize and manage their healthcare experience. This will also help the caregivers track their patients, and collect meaningful data from them. The app could be specific to diabetes, cancer, surgery, or pregnancy. 

   While I’m fine with any direction, I have a sister who has type 1, hereditary diabetes. She was diagnosed at 3 years old. It was a scary and confusing ordeal at first for my parents. It was a lot of work to manually write down blood sugar levels, report those numbers to the doctor, and for him to analyze that data. 

   A glucometer, is a device that measures blood sugar levels. They now have Bluetooth enabled glucometers, that can transfer the data via Bluetooth. With that, we could create an app that helps transfer, analyze, predict, visualize, store, and input data from the glucometer. There could be a web and mobile interface, with different views accessible to patients and caregivers. If numbers are dangerously out of the acceptable range, or if there is a continuing bad trend, there could be automated notifications to user and to caregiver. There’s many possibilities and features that could be implemented. 

I have a lot of relevant experience to implement a project like this! 

2. Craigslist++ (Neighborhood Market)

If you Google “Craigslist Scam”, you’ll get pages and pages of incidents and troubles. You probably have been or know somebody who has been on Craigslist who has been scammed. On a more sinister note, you’ve probably heard on the news about murders and sexual assaults that started as a Craigslist postings.

You have no idea who you’re dealing with. You risk being robbed, your house being ransacked, and your person being harmed.

Anybody can post, and no account or verification is required.

I would combine elements used in popular apps.

1.  eBay’s user system. Users get ratings from other users based on transactions.
2.  AirBnb, renters and rentees, have to verify their identity, and they also get a rating system.
3.   Communication within the app would be encouraged for safety.

3. Guitar Master

“Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.” Vince Lombardi

While most of the music world uses sheet music, many guitarists and bassists use “guitar tablature” to read and compose music. There are some programs such as Guitar Pro, which allow you to compose music, read music, and playback songs as midi. Guitar Tablature is open source, and there’s many communities that create tablature for songs, such as http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/. Anybody can “tab out” a song on Guitar Pro, and create a song file. They can then upload this song onto Ultimate Guitar for the world to benefit.

This is great for the community. There’s one barrier; There’s no way to track your progress or get feedback. You can’t tell how accurate you are.  The traditional way is to get a guitar teacher. They can point out areas that you need to work on. The limitation is that you see them once a week, and sometimes you don’t remember what you’re supposed to work on.

There’s been one answer to this, trying to combine the game Guitar Hero, with guitar education.

This game is a great start, but it has two major downfalls:

1. The songs available to play on the game are limited. New songs are added by the developers from time to time, but they cost money.

2. The game layout looks like Guitar Hero, which is non-intuitive to the normal guitar player.

It would be great to have a program similar to Guitar Pro, that tracks your playing. It would let you know which notes you hit, and what percentage of correct notes were played, and track progress. It would be lightweight and would be able to read the vast library of Guitar Pro files.

4. Restaurant Manager

Management uniform

I was a manager at McDonald's for a while, and we had to manage KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). We had to track inventory, sales, food waste, man hours, etc... at the end of the night. We entered all of this data manually into a DOS like command line computer. At the start of each shift, we had to position employees and we had to set goals on sales based on numbers from the same date from previous years and the same day of the week from last week. We positioned employees with a piece of paper, and we had to rely on experience to know which employees would be best in which position. If somebody didn't show up, we had to run into the manager's office to retrieve the employee binder and desperately call and try to find somebody who was available to work. We had to also be looking at the schedule printed on the wall to see who was available. We were supposed to share the goals with our crew, every hour to motivate them. A great idea, but with the current manual system, it was impossible to implement. There's a lot of potential to create software to manage all of this smarter.