UC Berkeley is home to thousands of students, faculty and staff but unfortunately, isn’t located in the safest neighborhood. Berkeley’s crime index is nearly double that of the national average with many crimes happening at night. In a recent survey, only 18% of respondents said they feel safe walking home alone. More than 60% of students said that BearWALK, the University’s current campus night escort system, is useful but needs improvement. PairWalk, is a mobile application designed to make Berkeley safer by allowing students to connect and find a buddy to walk with at night. With PairWalk, students simply enter their desired location and time and will be matched with other students going in the same direction. When a match can’t be found, users also have the option to call an Uber or Lyft, allowing students to safely get home any time, any day.
With 38,204 matriculated students and thousands of programs available on campus, the University of California Berkeley can often be a daunting place to find health services and support. In response to the issues that students face, the American Medical Student Association: Community and Public Health Committee seeks to create an iOS mobile phone application that works as a unique one-stop resource for addressing health at Berkeley connecting students with available support. While there are some other applications which provide limited information or help, the unique point of this application is to consolidate all resources that students would need into one centralized location. The application addresses mental health, sleep, nutrition, exercise, sexual health, illnesses, and provides assistance when walking home or at a party situation. In addition to direct student benefits, anonymous data from all application users could eventually be collected and analyzed for use with future campus projects.
Organic chemistry is one of the most “feared” classes amongst all undergraduates across the nation; this is partly because organic chemistry forces students to think visually about molecules and see how they can come together to create unique compounds. React! is an innovative and collaborative board game intended to address many of the challenges to learning organic chemistry. Created by a team of students who have proficiently mastered and taught all the subtle aspects of organic chemistry, React! is designed to meet the needs of students learning organic chemistry for the first time. The team has worked hard to structure the game such that players perceive organic chemistry as a challenging, yet rewarding puzzle as opposed to a series of facts to memorize. Ultimately, we hope React! empowers students to think critically about organic chemistry in a collaborative and entertaining environment.
Because of the breadth of departments and courses that Berkeley offers every semester, both undergraduate and graduate students often feel overwhelmed and either make course choices based on word of mouth recommendations or stick with their departmental offerings. Even when students choose to venture outside these academic silos, current tools require students to have specific goals or courses in mind, and as a result, students fall back to making decisions within known boundaries. To provide students with more knowledge and control to shape their academic journey, CourseExplorer is a mobile app that enables both current and prospective students to discover courses, subjects and topics of interest in a more engaging and interactive way. Emulating approaches similar to dating apps, CourseExplorer matches students’ predefined criteria with relevant courses. This encourages exploration and long-term academic engagement and planning.
When Berkeley undergraduates engage in immersive research experiences, it can be one of the most transformative and fruitful adventures of their college career. Yet, many new students are deterred from even getting started. This problem stems from a tendency for programs to favor already experienced students and difficulty for new students in navigating a complex myriad of Berkeley resources. ULAB is a student-run research laboratory to help freshman and sophomores from all backgrounds and skill levels get started in research. ULAB members tour research labs to engage with the research community, they complete mini research projects to develop skills that align with their interests, and they work with junior and senior mentors to build professional networks by learning from those who succeeded before them. We are emphasizing new ways to reach underrepresented and socioeconomically disadvantaged students by partnering with the residence halls and existing organizations.
InPrint is a lightweight, thin-film metal temporary tattoo that tracks tremors and drug usage for Parkinson’s patients. Parkinson’s is the second most common neurodegenerative disease and it can take up to six months for patients to find an effective drug regimen. Neurologists often change a patient’s treatment plan every two to three years due to the disease’s progression and have no way of accurately monitoring their symptoms during these transition periods. Applied onto the skin like a sticker, InPrint offers an accessible, low-cost method of detecting tremors while recording their duration and severity. By using the connected InPrint mobile app, patients can set medication reminders and input their drug intake while neurologists can evaluate patient symptoms to create a personalized medication schedule. Not only does InPrint make it easier to precisely monitor tremors, it can also shorten the six-month period typically needed to create a stable drug regimen.
Autonomic nervous system (ANS) disorders often go misdiagnosed or undiagnosed by physicians, especially in pediatric patients with less progressed pathologies. Delayed diagnosis exacerbates physiological and psychobehavioral symptoms associated with this class of diseases. AxoLog is a wearable screening tool catered to pediatric patients to allow for non-invasive and child-friendly diagnosis. The device employs electrodermal responses to quantitatively measure the nervous system response to a controlled clinical stimulus. With this device, we hope to reduce misdiagnosis in the short-term and lead to a reduction in physical and social implications for patients in the long term. Our device will create an impact in the clinical space by improving the diagnostic and treatment pathway for ANS disorders.
Laparoscopy is a form of surgery done through a series of small incisions that is becoming the standard for many procedures. Graspers are important tools used in laparoscopy, which allow surgeons to grip and manipulate tissue. Current graspers use a compressive head made of metal jaws with teeth that grip tissue. These graspers have a risk of injury, including perforating, tearing, or crushing delicate tissues. Complications from this form of tissue injury lead to negative health outcomes for patients and increased costs for hospitals. Our proposed solution is Lamprey, which helps surgeons perform laparoscopic surgery without tissue damage by facilitating atraumatic tissue manipulation. Lamprey uses vacuum power to grip tissue and thus spreads applied force over a greater area, resulting in lower pressure. This makes Lamprey safer than conventional graspers while still providing a strong grip on tissue.
Many international development organizations strive to improve livelihood around the world by providing products and services to those in need. Organizations rely on field surveys with target communities as the primary form of data collection to uncover the progress of their programs, but these methods are subject to response biases as well as being expensive and time-intensive. Sensen aims to strengthen the reliability of information between international development organizations and the beneficiaries they serve. The Sensen platform provides organizations with a robust and cost-effective solution for monitoring and evaluation to understand usage and performance of products in remote, low-resource settings. The core components of the platform are a cellular-enabled datalogger and a web analytics dashboard. The datalogger attaches to devices to measure, track, and upload information about product usage. This usage data is processed by analytical algorithms and turned into actionable information to support organizational decision-making.
