Olá from Houston! It’s been a full week since leaving Barretos and I’ve taken this time to reflect upon my experience working at Hospital de Amor in Barretos. We left Houston in June with a list of five tasks: conduct needs finding, tour the various departments at Hospital de Amor, present and get feedback on three existing Rice 360 technologies, inquire about four future Rice 360 projects, and propose and implement our own personal project (the Sorrisos App). Over the course of eight weeks, we completed these tasks all while speaking a foreign language, acclimating to a new culture, and picking up new skills on the fly. 

Before I elaborate on what surprised me most of this experience, I would like to share a bit about the feedback that we received from Dr. Denny on the Sorrisos App. 

Sorrisos App Final Presentation with Dr. Denny

We met with Dr. Denny on the last Thursday of our internship to present the final version of the Sorrisos app. Diego and I presented a polished version of Sorrisos complete with a functioning registration/login page, a tutorial for new users, an option to contact the hospital via a phone call or e-mail, an option to safely upload and send images to the Dental department, and a beautiful and logical user interface. Dr. Denny loved it. He really liked the implementation of email verification for users and how we designed and implemented the image upload portion of the app and how it allows patients to name files (which facilitates identification for doctors and nurses on the receiving end). Dr. Denny also appreciated how Sorrisos could be used for nurses and doctors who conduct domiciliary visits so they can upload images and medical notes remotely and securely. 

Sorrisos: Next Steps

Dr. Denny also highlighted some areas for improvement. In the next iteration of the Sorrisos app, we hope to successfully implement an instant chat portion en lieu of the current system where patients are prompted to write and send an email to the dental department with symptoms and other concerns. Leading up to our final presentation, Diego and I both attempted to integrate the chat-app component to Sorrisos using various methods and approaches yet each attempt presented a number of other obstacles that would require more time to address. In the future, the “upload image” and “report symptoms” pages will be combined in the form of an instant chat instead of two seperate pages as they currently exist. Dr. Denny also suggested that we add a tutorial video showing new users how to take detailed images of their mouth ailments. We will attempt to create the video using feedback and instruction from Dr. Denny since we do not yet know what exactly goes into taking a detailed image. In the future, I think it could also be really neat for the user to be able to take an image of their mouth, upload and view the image on the Sorrisos app, and then highlight the sensitive area on their smartphones. While Sorrisos currently works on Android, in the future, we need to make sure that it is also iOS compatible since many doctors have iPhones and not android phones (although most patients use Android phones). 

Sorrisos will be used by both patients and doctors. While it is a single application, it must cater to the unique needs of the two main types of users. This proved to be a bit difficult in the first iteration but is super important. Sorrisos 2.0 will ask the user to specify whether they are a patient or a doctor/nurse and will include steps to verify their affiliation with Hospital de Amor. The need for specification manifests itself mainly when it comes to the chat portion and patient information access. We want doctors and nurses to be able to access all patients’ information and images and grant them the ability to communicate with each and every user. However, we do not want patients to be able to communicate with or access the information of other patients. Hence the distinction and verification of roles is crucial! While on the topic of making the app more secure, we will look into other methods to bolster app security and include terms and conditions to make app usage transparent. 

The feedback was super useful and I cannot wait to continue to tinker and iterate to refine the app. Dr. Denny also informed us that, once we create a final version ready for actual implementation, we could write a medical journal article with his help and *potentially* get published for creating the first mobile app for dentistry and terminal care. WHATTTT? I was surprised not only by the potential for getting published but also be the overall feedback and the opportunity to actually see the application of our hard work. I left the final presentation feeling accomplished fulfilled above all. I have experience working in teams, designing mathematical models and medical devices, and presenting our ideas to professors and panels yet it was my first time actually seeing the potential impact of a project I worked on. I am thankful to Rice 360 and to Hospital de Amor for granting me this special experience. 

Two Months in Barretos: My Takeaways

These past two months have been some of the most transformative for me in my time at Rice. In my earlier blog posts, I highlighted my desire to become comfortable pushing and expanding the boundaries of my comfort zone. After a summer filled with communicating in Portuguese, learning how to work efficiently with new teammates and partners, diving into the new and *scary* world of app building, and proposing med-tech solutions for real patients and doctors, I feel like I’ve come to genuinely crave the same challenges that once intimidated me. I really saw the change once I settled in at home. Before Barretos, I was such a creature a habit: sticking to the same daily routines over and over again. That was comfortable! Now, I crave movement and new experiences even in Houston, a city I’ve lived in and “known” for 15 years! I hope to foster this hunger for new experiences and challenges into my remaining years at Rice and beyond. 

On a similar note, I became a DO-er while working at Hospital de Amor. Sometimes I can commit to too many things and spread myself thin. I have a broad collection of interests that I wish to involve myself in but it can be hard for me to know when to take a time out. Coming to Barretos, we had a pretty extensive list of tasks to complete and my natural instinct was to give 200% for each one of the tasks. Looking back, I know such an approach is not sustainable and can actually lead to inefficiencies down the line. Instead, we decided to complete the tasks as asked and then give 200% to our personal project, Sorrisos. By capitalizing on one project, I learned to shift my focus a bit from thinking about solutions to actually building and implementing them without the fear of failure. I allowed myself to iterate through designs and methods (especially when creating the Sorrisos app) and found that I enjoyed tasks at hand when I put my head down and just started. 

Above all, what I am most thankful to Hospital de Amor for giving me is a humanistic perspective and approach to medicine and engineering. I feel like a broken record but the healthcare at Hospital de Amor is not just about getting the patient in and out of the hospital. It’s about healing the patient while making the day-to-day treatment as bearable and painless as possible by making anyone who comes through hospital doors feel at home and welcome. I am beyond impressed by the lengths our partners and mentors at the hospital would go to. Providing exceptional and free healthcare to everyone/anyone. Dr. Elaine remembering patient names from 18 different regions around Barretos. Hospital de Amor’s commitment to improving healthcare across Brazil through the implementation of mobile clinics, teaching seminars, and partnerships with smaller, public hospitals. Carol taking time out of her day to bring me medicine, fruit, and gatorade when I was sick. The doctors willing to meet with us, give us feedback on our ideas, and propose new implementations. The people we were lucky enough to meet and work with were, above all, selfless and wanted to make the most of others’ experience–be it patients or two American undergrad students trying to build a mobile app. Our friends at Hospital de Amor genuinely want to change the world for the better through celebrating life and putting their patients’ wellbeing and quality of life at the very center of any decision making. I really admired this quality and approach to their work and hope to implement the same spirit in my future ventures. 

I feel that I grew and became closer to the type of engineer, teammate, and person I wish to become because of this opportunity. I would like to thank Rice 360, my parents, Carol, my donors, Diego, and Hospital de Amor for the experience of a lifetime. You all made this opportunity so special for me and I cannot put into words how grateful and inspired I am. THANK YOU.

 

Signing off, 

Paula