KK: Ethan, how did you come up with the idea of doing the health literacy app? Did you come up with that idea all by yourself? Was there some influence from your dad?

EM: My dad had already done a study with REALM.

KM: We had done a research project, and it was very labor-intensive having a student do all this interviewing. Even with the brief validated tool of the REALM short form, it still was labor-intensive.

EM: And so I said, well, you can just automate it. Put it on a smartphone. We have voice recognition.

Figure 1. PE Board

KK: So this was the second generation of that project, taking good data and being able to apply it at the bedside. Tell us about the new project.

EM: I call it the PE Board, which stands for Pediatric Electronic Board. In an emergency situation where a child requires resuscitation, you can put them on this board, and it can tell you the child’s weight and then it connects with an app on your smartphone that tells you the amount of drug dosages, endotracheal tube sizes, and joules for resuscitation. I got this idea because right now the gold standard is the Broselow Tape, a length-based system to estimate the weight of a child. So far it’s worked really well, but recently kids have been getting bigger, and it’s been shown that the Broselow Tape can have up to a 10 percent error almost half of the time. I thought, “Why not just put a scale in there?”

KK: Tell me how you went through the process of starting and developing the PE Board and how this thing looks.

EM: The spine board [that we used as a template] is a really bright yellow. It has a border going all the way around the general outline and then on the inside it’s hollow, which is where we put the disassembled Bluetooth bathroom scale. There are four load cells placed strategically around a child’s midsection and their legs to get the most accurate reading. On top of the load cells is a bright metal plate that can be easily sterilized and then, on the very top of it, there is an LCD screen, which can show a child’s actual weight [see Figure 1].

KK: What was your biggest challenge developing this?

EM: I had two moments actually. One was when I was learning how. I’d never soldered wires before. When I was trying to rip apart the Bluetooth scale, there was a bit of an incident with solder where I plopped a whole glob of solder on top of the main circuit board, which was very scary.