Jasmine Zhang

Yi Lin Yang, president of the Digital Health Club presents how to help cure Parkinson’s disease. She said they are currently working on a machine learning program to remove the effects of the disease from people’s speech.

What is the Digital Health Club?

We do research on wearable devices such as the Empatica E4 as a type of wearable device. It contains clusters of sensors that measure a ton of physiological signals, like how much you sweat, your emotions, the temperature of your body, your heart rate, all of that. And we use that device to see if we can gain insight to your health by running the data through algorithms.

What made you start this club?

This was actually because of my internship at Eli Lilly where I interned with the digital health club there and learned a lot about digital biomarkers and deriving sleep quality from data from wearable devices. I learned about (different) voice biomarkers to use and how we can detect Alzheimer’s disease, for example. All of this made me really interested in digital health and that’s what made me want to start a club involving digital health (at this school).

What is your favorite thing about this club?

Well, we just launched a sleep schedule (tracker for the E4) and I think that speaks towards how much we do in this club. We do things in all different areas. (For example, if) you’re interested in programming, you can code in this club. One of our team members is trying to make webscripts for downloading the data that comes from the E4 because the data is collected over a multitude of days. We’re also working on machine learning algorithms to try to detect Parkinson’s disease from (someone’s) voice. We’re also trying to get started on a paper and evaluate the effect of stress on sleep schedule for high schoolers.