Being selected for Rice University's PATHS-UP Digital Health Young Scholars program, a federally funded program focused on digital health and emerging technologies, was one of the most formative experiences I've had as a student. Out of applicants from across the country, 12 high schoolers were chosen. I was one of them, and the program fundamentally changed how I think about what engineering is for.
My teammate and I built a low-cost wearable prototype designed to help monitor Parkinson's in an accessible, affordable way. The device used wearable sensors to track tremors and other indicators, and sent alerts over Bluetooth when readings crossed certain thresholds. There were plenty of technical challenges along the way, like debugging sensor communication, handling edge cases in the data, and making the hardware reliable, but the main challenge we addressed was the device's design and use.
We kept asking: who exactly is using this? What does their day actually look like? A caregiver managing a parent with Parkinson's isn't going to read a technical manual. The interface needs to work the first time, without explanation. That constraint shaped every decision we made about alert thresholds, display clarity, and the simplicity of the hardware setup. Designing for someone else, especially someone in a stressful situation, is completely different from building something for yourself.
Presenting at the Rice University symposium was also a first for me: explaining technical work to an audience that included faculty, graduate students, and people who had spent decades in the field. I learned that confidence in explaining your process matters as much as the project itself. You have to own what you built, including the parts you'd do differently next time.
Growing up in a family with roots in India, I've seen how inaccessible healthcare technology can be, not just in cost, but in its design assumptions. Tools built for well-resourced environments often fail where infrastructure or literacy looks different. PATHS-UP pushed me to take that gap seriously, and now I can't really think about engineering without asking: who does this work for, and who does it leave out?
More on the device itself, including the poster: Parkinson's Care Watch.