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Connect Wolf Intern: Isabel Joyce

Carnegie Mellon University 
Material Science and Engineering
Biomedical Engineering

Client Engagement Project for Bioengineered Product

Career Goals 
Isabel likes to work in teams and enjoys helping others. Her long term career goals are to either work on medical devices or clinical research so she can have a positive impact on others. 

What’s Her Why?
It’s important to help others and to be part of a biological or biomedical field that would allow her to make life-improving products. 

Publications

Ethical Considerations of Telehealth
The Top Three Resources for Baby Tech Reviews & Info
The Dangers of Smart Baby Monitors and How to Avoid Being Hacked
At what age does monitoring your child’s location and well-being become a violation of privacy?
The Importance of Parenting Education and the App to the Rescue

What else does she do?
She enjoys reading in her spare time. If she isn’t reading an entertaining fictional story, she is learning about real events – both past and current – so she can apply it to her work.  She joined the CMU rowing club where she can compete in races while building strong relationships with her teammates. 

Mini-Bio
Isabel Joyce is a Materials Science & Engineering student with a minor in Biomedical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Though most of her time is spent towards her classes and research, Isabel is dedicated to learning new things outside of the classroom as well. In her free time, Isabel likes to read books of various genres and topics, to help expand her world view. She is also an active member of her school’s rowing team, where she held the role of Recruitment Chair on the board for two years and is now a part of the Diversity & Inclusion Committee. Isabel plans on applying the skills and knowledge she’s obtained from her education and extracurriculars to her future career in the biomedical and public health field, so she can be a strong team player and create a positive impact on others.

Dementia Research

This summer I began my internship trying to find out if there were any applications this product could have for families with dementia patients. The idea behind this is that dementia patients tend to wander, without really realizing where they may be going or without regard for safety, which can concern family members. The issue with this project was that during COVID-19, it was difficult to get in touch with clinicians and senior care center workers because the elderly population is so severely affected by this virus. I did get in touch with a dementia clinician and a social worker, who confirmed my initial thoughts that the device would be useful for families with dementia patients. The one issue they both confirmed is that it may be difficult to get dementia patients who are in denial, to be comfortable wearing a wristband monitoring their location and well-being. Dementia patients who are more accepting of their condition would be more likely to accept wearing the wristband. 

If the future of this product is to be inserted in clothes, then it may be more applicable to most dementia patients. I only interviewed two people, so it may be worth it to interview more people. Perhaps going directly to the families who take care of family members with dementia to discover their needs. 

Writing for the App

Because the dementia project was really slow moving, I decided to move on to another project. I’ve been writing little pieces of information for the app. Most of what I’ve been writing has been on parenting tips & tricks and child development, all the information is routed in either the child psychology class I took the previous semester, or research papers I’ve been reading on child development via Science Daily and other sources of information. I haven’t been trusting any random news sources because I’ve found a lot of the information isn’t 100% accurate. 

My idea for the app, and I’ve talked to Yifan about this, is having a section for moms to communicate with each other and a section of educational info (like what I’m writing) in a Quora-style kind of format. 

Isabel on LinkedIn