MyMemoryMonitor

MyMemoryMonitor was a project I built as part of a fellowship I received from my high school (The Reid Mangels Fellowship).

The inspiration behind the project arose during conversations at the dinner table with my family. My mother works in drug regulatory (no, not the DEA like in Breaking Bad); she works behind a desk and analyzes different drugs as well as their approval processes. So our family conversations at times veer from my brother and I recounting what happened in our day at school today, to a new medicine that has just been approved by the FDA.

At the time, and still to this day, my interests lay in math and computer science. I wasn't much of a chemist or biologist, so most of the jargon and technical speak my mom discussed would go over my head. One thing that I did happen to hear from my mom (and that I could understand) was that the drug development and approval process could sometimes take up to 15 years, which granted that I was around 15/16 years old around the time, stood out to me as a very long period of time.

One other thing about me that does play into this story, is that I am very particular. Not in the sense that I need all my pencils sharpened and lined out on my desk precisely, but that I try to optimize what I do to be most effective. Like as a kid, I ate all the foods I disliked on my plate (veggies), before eating the things I liked. Or when biking to school, I'd continuously tweak my route to be most optimal.

When I heard of the opportunity to receive funding to accomplish a project (my high school's fellowship program), from an upperclassmen I looked up to; I knew I definitely had to apply and complete a project.

The intent behind MyMemoryMonitor was to combine my passions for computer science and statistics, and apply them towards societal benefit. The original idea was to build an application for patient and caregiver reported-outcomes for clinical trials; allowing Alzheimer's patients and caregivers to provide additional information as to how the medicine was affecting them more personally. Though after several discussions with doctors and professors from Stanford, Tufts, and the Alzheimer's association; I pivoted towards clinical care (because it seemed it would be more novel in this area).

Up until this point, my coding projects had been a scramble. Random bits of python and web development. And one important note is that LLMs had not yet become popular at this point. I had heard of React before, so I began the project by reading a book I found online: "The Road to React." I will forever be grateful to Robin Dierwich, for providing this text.

I built the first version of MyMemoryMonitor, a simple web application built with React as well as Firebase (what I had used in prior years for my authentication and database).

Though this initial prototype was comprehensive, it was basically completely unusable for the audience I intended to target.

So I spent a few more weeks learning another framework, Next.js, as well as React Native (through Expo). To build a comprehensive mobile application. I built out a backend in Express.js (hosted on Railway), the mobile app on Expo, and the Next.js app (hosted on Vercel).

At the end, I had a usable proof-of-concept; this was my first foray into full-stack development.