Week 3: Three Times the Charm (Highlights from SRP Week Three)

Hello dedicated readers,

I am fully aware that it is now week 4 of SRP's not week three but I got a bit behind in posting and trust you are a forgiving crowd...

It is said that 3 times is the charm. That maxim felt appropriate last week as I finally began to get into the flow of my work.

With the Pascua Yaqui Tribe I finally finished the "New Employee Orientation" that all individuals involved with the tribal government must complete. It was a 6 hour program where they went over tribe history as well as the ethics, drug policies and harassment-free culture of the tribal government. Some of the information did not apply to me as a volunteer (employee benefits for instance), but I did learn a lot and also got to meet some wonderful women who were doing the orientation along-side me. One of them was a seasoned nurse from New Orleans who had moved to Tucson two days prior for the job with the tribe. She told me a lot about her time working as a psychiatric nurse which I found fascinating (neuroscience is one of my favorite subjects ever). Another of them was a nurse who had worked with El Rio for over 30 years, but had just retired and was coming on as a part-time employee and thus had to take the orientation again. She talked a lot about her experiences as a nurse there. Once the day was over I was issued my employee badge which was exciting...and now I can OFFICIALLY begin my work there (though unofficially I already did).

Side note: This week I am going out of town on Thursday with my fellow Bit Buckets to attend our first FRC regional in Central Valley California. I am so excited for the trip but it also means I won't get to work with the tribe on Friday. It will give me a little bit of time to prepare and plan interviews that I would like to do with people working with the diabetes prevention program.

The rest of my time last week was spent at the University Medical Center where I got to continue working on a number of different projects.

Last week I mentioned doing some background review for the prospective studies on gait analysis in the prediction of diabetic foot ulcers and exercise in dialysis patients. I have continued work on these. If you want to see my preliminary article review you can check them out: 1. Exercise in Dialysis Patients 2. Gait Analysis and Foot Ulcers. For the exercise in dialysis patients I began to investigate whether dialysis patients suffer from other physical limitations/frailty that would make certain exercises difficult and compromise their physical health. For this study, I am interested in whether ankle strengthening exercises would be beneficial to dialysis patients because they provide a minimally destructive form of muscle strengthening. If you want to read more about that in particular, see my report: Physical Functioning on Dialysis. At this point I have begun doing a systematic review for the dialysis project (basically using certain key search words like Hemodialysis, Exercise, and Physical Functioning I search all of PubMed for articles related to the subject and then go through every single one—there are 591—to find whether it is meaningful for our particular study). I am about half way done with the review now.
 
Beyond that I also continued my data analysis work using MATLAB. The data I am looking at now involves diabetic patients completing walking trials. I looked at two different sets that included normal walking, dual task walking (walking while simultaneously counting back by 7's from some odd starting number), and walking over obstacles. The program uses data from accelerometers attached to the participants legs (one of the sets also includes data from the back) to graph movement, find knee angles throughout the stride, see time spent on each foot, and calculate walking speeds. The analysis is still not quite done but it is getting there. I still need to do the analysis on the control group and then compare the results.

One thing I was very excited about last week was that I got to go to the clinic to observe (I cannot do it alone because I am still under 18) data collection. We were going to be receiving a smart mat back from a participant who had been using it all year and do a follow up gait analysis test. Unfortunately, she got a flat tire and did not show but the clinic was still pretty cool.

I will try to be more punctual with my next post...

Thank you for reading and I wish you all the best.