Karnika Singh

I once saw a video on YouTube that showed a scientist explaining their research to people of different age groups and backgrounds and it completely fascinated me. I had always wondered how I would go about doing that. Fortunately, I did not have to wonder for long.

I hosted my first ever virtual workshop for Digital Biomarker Discovery Education (dbpdED) last month. The aim of the workshop was to introduce high school students to the digital biomarker discovery pipeline. The workshop was held at the North Carolina School of Science and Math (NCSSM) where 9 students with different levels of coding experience all successfully executed code at their own pace to discover how physical activity affects heart rate. Dr. Hubbard, a Duke BME PhD alumnus and current instructor at NCSSM, helped us set up the workshop to take the students in her bioinstrumentation class through wearable data analysis. We hope to continue the collaboration and organize multiple such workshops in the future.

In many ways, a class I took last semester on science communication helped me prepare for this journey. It made me reflect on things such as how to adapt your content based on your audience as well as the type of event and the medium of communication. Moreover, it made me realize the importance of communicating research to diverse audiences. As part of the course, we also prepared for a ted talk about our research which really helped me think about how I can make my research engaging for anyone who knows nothing about the field. I am truly grateful to Duke University for emphasizing the importance of science communication and offering such incredible courses (kudos to Dr. Jory Weintraub for doing a fantastic job teaching the course).

The experience of putting this workshop together taught me the challenges associated with introducing your research to diverse audiences and the importance of doing so. By improving access to scientific methods and research, I hope to generate interest in the field of biomedical data science. When I was a student in high school back in India, I did not have a lot of opportunities to engage in discussions about research practices with researchers. I was fortunate enough to get that opportunity during my first year of college when I was chosen to be the event host for a science conclave where I got to meet and attend seminars from several Nobel Laureates and eminent scientists. Hearing some of the best minds speak passionately about their research and its implications was an amazing experience. I was also fascinated by how they could captivate diverse groups by styling their presentations according to the audience, be it high school students, or undergraduate and graduate students. Engaging in discussions with scientists, researchers and students who had come from all over the world, I realized how much of an impact hearing about research could have in igniting passion for science in students. However, I also realized that all students do not necessarily get access to such opportunities.

Looking back, I know I would have loved an opportunity to hear about the experiences of researchers much earlier. Why do scientists do what they do? What motivates them to dedicate themselves to advancing a particular field? Is this the correct path for me? Can a scientific career help me accomplish my goals and reach where I want to see myself in a couple years? These are just some of the questions I would have asked if I had an opportunity to engage with researchers. As I embark on my own journey as a graduate student researcher, I hope to be able to do my part to help all students get that opportunity.

The field of digital biomarker discovery is fairly new and holds tremendous potential. The ubiquity of smartwatches and wearable trackers has enabled continuous, long term physiological data to be available from diverse demographic groups. This has given us the ability to identify early signs of health concerns and help us prevent diseases from progressing substantially in many individuals. However, there is little awareness about the field. Exposing more students to engaging experiences in the field can help get more students interested in the field at an early stage and increase representation from various groups in research. For me, dbdpED It is an opportunity to reach hundreds and thousands of students from diverse backgrounds and provide them an opportunity to freely access research tools.

This idea has probably never held as much importance as it does in the current difficult times. With multiple studies exploring the use of smartwatches and smart rings for early detection of COVID-19 infection, there are still concerns around how the process works. Our project CovIdentify was also launched last year to explore the potential of smartwatches for early detection of COVID-19 infection. We need more transparency around the process of utilizing wearable device data for disease detection and we need to generate more awareness about the field. Not only this will help increase representation from all groups in scientific research but will also help build and strengthen public trust in digital biomarker discovery.

I once saw a video on youtube that showed a scientist explaining their research to people of different age groups and backgrounds and it completely fascinated me. I had always wondered how I would go about doing that. Fortunately, I did not have to wonder for long.

I hosted my first ever virtual workshop for Digital Biomarker Discovery Education (dbpdED) last month. The aim of the workshop was to introduce high school students to the digital biomarker discovery pipeline. The workshop was held at the North Carolina School of Science and Math (NCSSM) where 9 students with different levels of coding experience all successfully executed code at their own pace to discover how physical activity affects heart rate. Dr. Hubbard, a Duke BME PhD alumnus and current instructor at NCSSM, helped us set up the workshop to take the students in her bioinstrumentation class through wearable data analysis. We hope to continue the collaboration and organize multiple such workshops in the future.

In many ways, a class I took last semester on science communication helped me prepare for this journey. It made me reflect on things such as how to adapt your content based on your audience as well as the type of event and the medium of communication. Moreover, it made me realize the importance of communicating research to diverse audiences. As part of the course, we also prepared for a ted talk about our research which really helped me think about how I can make my research engaging for anyone who knows nothing about the field. I am truly grateful to Duke University for emphasizing the importance of science communication and offering such incredible courses (kudos to Dr. Jory Weintraub for doing a fantastic job teaching the course).

The experience of putting this workshop together taught me the challenges associated with introducing your research to diverse audiences and the importance of doing so. By improving access to scientific methods and research, I hope to generate interest in the field of biomedical data science. When I was a student in high school back in India, I did not have a lot of opportunities to engage in discussions about research practices with researchers. I was fortunate enough to get that opportunity during my first year of college when I was chosen to be the event host for a science conclave where I got to meet and attend seminars from several Nobel Laureates and eminent scientists. Hearing some of the best minds speak passionately about their research and its implications was an amazing experience. I was also fascinated by how they could captivate diverse groups by styling their presentations according to the audience, be it high school students, or undergraduate and graduate students. Engaging in discussions with scientists, researchers and students who had come from all over the world, I realized how much of an impact hearing about research could have in igniting passion for science in students. However, I also realized that all students do not necessarily get access to such opportunities.

Looking back, I know I would have loved an opportunity to hear about the experiences of researchers much earlier. Why do scientists do what they do? What motivates them to dedicate themselves to advancing a particular field? Is this the correct path for me? Can a scientific career help me accomplish my goals and reach where I want to see myself in a couple years? These are just some of the questions I would have asked if I had an opportunity to engage with researchers. As I embark on my own journey as a graduate student researcher, I hope to be able to do my part to help all students get that opportunity.

The field of digital biomarker discovery is fairly new and holds tremendous potential. The ubiquity of smartwatches and wearable trackers has enabled continuous, long term physiological data to be available from diverse demographic groups. This has given us the ability to identify early signs of health concerns and help us prevent diseases from progressing substantially in many individuals. However, there is little awareness about the field. Exposing more students to engaging experiences in the field can help get more students interested in the field at an early stage and increase representation from various groups in research. For me, dbdpED It is an opportunity to reach hundreds and thousands of students from diverse backgrounds and provide them an opportunity to freely access research tools.

This idea has probably never held as much importance as it does in the current difficult times. With multiple studies exploring the use of smartwatches and smart rings for early detection of COVID-19 infection, there are still concerns around how the process works. Our project CovIdentify was also launched last year to explore the potential of smartwatches for early detection of COVID-19 infection. We need more transparency around the process of utilizing wearable device data for disease detection and we need to generate more awareness about the field. Not only this will help increase representation from all groups in scientific research but will also help build and strengthen public trust in digital biomarker discovery.

A few months ago, our lab (the BIG IDEAS lab at Duke) launched the dbdpED (Digital Biomarker Discovery – Education) initiative that aims to provide anyone with the tools to get started with digital biomarker discovery. With the help of GradEngage I have been working to expand the initiative to increase access to and awareness around digital biomarker research. To start it off, I have set up a virtual workshop with high school students at North Carolina School of Science and Math (NCSSM) in Durham where I will give them a glimpse into digital biomarker research. To organize the workshops, I have been working with Dr. Letitia Hubbard, who is currently teaching a bioinstrumentation course at NCSSM for high school students. Interestingly, Dr. Hubbard received her Ph.D in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University, where she was James B. Duke Scholar, a National Science Foundation Fellow, and a UNCF/Merck Graduate fellow. Her research focus at Duke was to study arrhythmias in the heart using computational models. It has been really great connecting with her and working with her closely to get insights on how to best structure the workshop.

My workshop aims to introduce students to wearable devices, the kind of data obtained from them, and how that data can be used. The real challenge has been framing it as a story as I take them through the process of wearable data analysis to make it all the more engaging. How can I make the analysis more relatable? How can I explain a concept in a way that is easy to understand? How do I structure the workshop to make it more riveting and pique the students’ interests? These are just some of the questions that have cropped up in my mind since I set out designing the workshop.

With this workshop and the subsequent ones, I aim to generate awareness around the field of digital biomarkers at an early age in students. I aim to give them insights into how wearables work and what can digital biomarker discovery help with. Digital biomarkers have never held more importance than they do now in the current difficult times. The COVID-19 pandemic, has underscored the need for timely detection of infection especially outside of clinical settings, to avoid further straining healthcare resources. Multiple studies have demonstrated that there are changes in physiological and behavioral parameters measured by smartwatches, including high resting heart rate (HR), decreased blood oxygen saturation, disturbed sleep, decreased physical activity, and changes in wear habits, that can indicate when the body is fighting off an infection, and before the onset of obvious symptoms. Using wearables like activity trackers for continuous COVID-19 management can nudge individuals towards a proactive, data-empowered, and personal-responsibility driven approach for COVID-19 infection management.

Confucius once said “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.” To ensure the students get the most out of this workshop, they will be working with the data themselves! I will be distributing modular codes and sample data to the students to encourage true exploration and better understanding. I will systematically take the students through multiple steps involved in wearable data analysis for digital biomarker discovery. Data from wearables can be exported into common file formats and loaded into software applications like google colab and jupyter notebooks for analysis. Once the data is loaded, it needs to be pre-processed to clean it up in preparation for further analysis. Data pre-processing can involve multiple steps depending on the data and analysis goals. I will introduce students to several of these steps and help them easily understand their purpose and utility. Exploratory Data Analysis is usually the next step where you can generate some insightful and easy to understand figures from your data. As the name suggests, it is aimed at exploring your data before delving into the analysis. This can help establish trends in your data and help you better understand your data.

We will then generate some cool visualizations from wearables data and look at the multiple ways the same data can be visualized depending on context. Along with all this, I also want to convey the challenges that accompany digital biomarker research, one of the most important ones being privacy concerns.

The process of putting together a lesson plan has been enlightening for how I can effectively communicate my research. I have realized it’s as much art as it is science. While some of the analysis I will use for the workshop comes from my own research, it has been really interesting trying to think of the different ways I can convey the same information depending on the audience and the different contexts it can be used in. With this initiative, I hope to make some young minds curious about this research area and maybe even inspire some of them to pursue a career in the field of digital biomarker research.

In this day and age, most of us have probably seen or used fitness and activity trackers at some point. There are a plethora of commercial smartwatches and rings available from brands like Apple, Garmin, Fitbit, and Oura to name a few. We know that these can be extremely useful in tracking activity, sleep, and heart rate but the fact that they can be extremely useful in early disease detection remains fairly lesser known. There are ongoing investigations on the use of these devices for research on Alzheimer’s disease, breast cancer, movement-related disorders, flu and more recently even COVID-19. How, you might be thinking? Welcome to the world of digital biomarkers!

Digital biomarkers are digitally collected data that are transformed into indicators of health outcomes. For instance, glucose levels measured from a continuous glucose monitor can be useful in predicting diabetic state. I am a graduate student in biomedical engineering at the BIG IDEAS Lab and our research focuses on analyzing wearable device data to develop digital biomarkers and gain useful health insights.

When our body starts getting affected by a particular health condition or disorder, say a viral infection or diseases like diabetes, our physiological signals start changing, sometimes slowly over time. These physiological signals can be tracked over a long period of time using wearable devices like fitness trackers. With the use of data analytics and machine learning tools, we can train our algorithms to detect these small changes in the body’s physiological signature to alert us of disease onset or progression. I am fascinated by the potential it holds to transform the way we look at healthcare and am excited about generating more awareness around digital biomarker research.

There are quite a few challenges that digital biomarker research currently faces. The codes and algorithms are often not freely available and the research requires familiarity with coding which often alienates people who are not comfortable with codes. In order to make digital biomarker discovery more accessible and collaborative, our lab developed an open-source platform called the Digital Biomarker Discovery Pipeline (DBDP). The DBDP features code sets, functions, and algorithms for the entire digital biomarker discovery pipeline. For more information about the platform, read this fantastic blog by our lab member here.

In order to expand the initiative and spread general awareness about digital biomarkers, we have recently launched dbdpED (DBDP — Education). dbdpED will aim to provide you with all the tools to get started with digital biomarker discovery. For the first phase of the dbdpED launch, we will focus on developing resources for high school students. The field of digital health is quite new and there is an excess of jargon around digital biomarkers discovery. We need

more resources to make this field inclusive and accessible. With the support of GradEngage, I aim to develop detailed and easy to understand lesson plans and organize workshops for the students at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics (NCSSM) on wearable data analysis. These workshops will give the students a chance to explore the various aspects of wearable data analysis and engage in discussions about the utility of the field. I aim to introduce the students to the various steps of digital biomarker discovery pipeline and encourage them to explore the various code sets that will be made available through the dbdpED platform. With extensive video tutorials and blogs, we will expand the dbdpED platform to make the end-to-end process of digital biomarker discovery available to anyone new to the field. The DBDP has multiple code sets for different stages of digital biomarker discovery. dbdpED will help you easily understand the purpose and utility of these code sets. These in-depth tutorials will provide users with a fun and engaging learning experience for digital biomarker discovery.

Not only will this help students gain an enriching experience in wearable data technology, data science and visualisation tools, it can be a great tool for personal health monitoring. The idea is to give students a taste of digital biomarker research and generate interest in the field early on. I am excited about engaging with the students and gaining their perspective on how this platform can be truly useful for young students. I believe this experience will prove to be uniquely enriching for me and help make the dbdpED platform what it is meant to be, useful, easy to grasp, and fun!