Senior Design Initial Thoughts and Observations

Paul Zuo

1. What is your personal goal for this semester? That is, what are you hoping to
do/accomplish/learn?
Im hoping to build a drowsiness-detection product that is ultimately impactful not just for the
laboratory but also for industry. By industry, I mean potential commercialized use for pilots,
police officers, students, doctors, and beyond. I think there is a lot of business potential with a
quick, mobile sleep deprivation detection assessment. The use cases go far beyond just
adoption in the laboratory. I hope to learn more about iOS programming and app development.
I have not had much experience with iOS development before, and Im very eager to learn.

2. What part of your project are you most excited about or interested in?
Im most excited about the statistical learning model that the assessment is centered around,
tweaking that model, and making it even better. The current model is rooted in Bayesian
probability, but its also very simple. It doesnt take into account whether a user is disabled or
what the age of the user is. There are many additional variables that can be taken into account
that correlate to slower response times or false starts. Im excited to dig deeper into the
algorithm!

3. What are you most worried or concerned about?

Im worried about the issue regarding iPhone touch latency. So much of the PVT-A algorithm
depends on the response time from the user, and with iOS only has a high-level API for touch
gestures. What this means is that there will likely be some delay in measuring user response
times, which will inevitably exacerbate the accuracy of the PVT-A model.

4. What made you choose this project and/or this team?

I chose this project because I was very interested in this years M&T senior design theme. Ive
always been fascinated by the notion of personalized health, and using machine and statistical
learning to further improve upon personalized health is very trendy right now. This project
seems to fit in with my interests with statistical and machine learning as well as my desire to
work on high-impact projects.

5. How much effort do you think youll put into this course each week? Why not more?
I hope to put in around 6-8 hours of work a week into this class. I think thats a fair amount to
put in, given that most CIS classes that Im in currently take around 7-9 hours a week. 6-8 hours
a week would put me on track to finishing the necessary work by the course deadlines as well
as our team-imposed deadlines.

6. What do you bring to the team? What will your major contribution be? You can mention
stuff not in your bio from the project prospectus
I think my main contribution will be on the algorithm/model side. I have some experience with
Bayesian statistics, and I am pretty familiar with probability models as well. My main
contribution will be working with the massive amounts of data that our medical faculty advisors
have given us and playing around with the many variables to see which ones might be strong
covariates to include in our models Bayesian updates. Ideally, I can find a modified (or totally
new) algorithm/statistical model that outperforms the existing PVT-A algorithm.