Cloudy skies early, followed by partial clearing. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 87F. Winds light and variable..
Mainly clear. Low 69F. Winds light and variable.
Robotics was one of the many technologies that campers Esmeralda Delgado, left, and Samaria Paige learned while attending the 2022 MIS STEM Camp.
Campers learn how ECU’s College of Nursing is using manikins and technology to help train nursing students as part of the university’s 2022 MIS STEM camp.
Robotics was one of the many technologies that campers Esmeralda Delgado, left, and Samaria Paige learned while attending the 2022 MIS STEM Camp.
Campers learn how ECU’s College of Nursing is using manikins and technology to help train nursing students as part of the university’s 2022 MIS STEM camp.
Robotics is one of thousands of technologies categorized under “T” in STEM — science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
For this year’s MIS STEM Camp, sponsored by the Department of Management Information Systems in East Carolina University’s College of Business (COB), robotics was also a focus of the program.
For two weeks in July, 17 middle school-aged girls from the Boys & Girls Club of the Coastal Plains descended on campus to build and code robots, create stories about robotics, tour ECU’s health sciences simulation lab that featured robotic patients and possibly find their inner entrepreneur.
Twelve-year-old Esmeralda Delgado of Greenville attended this year’s STEM camp and took full advantage of its offerings.
“We built a website and robots out of Legos, which was very fun,” Delgado said.
The entrepreneurial side of Delgado showed at camp when she pitched a project that dealt with animal abuse. Her idea came from a recent rescue encounter with an eastern box turtle and her knowledge of what happens to animals in shelters. The MIS STEM Camp’s new focus on entrepreneurship allowed Delgado to flesh out her idea and pitch it.
Plus, the STEM camp already has Delgado thinking about her future.
“I would like to finish school and probably go to college and be a veterinarian,” Delgado said. “I want to go to ECU.”
Delgado’s goal to attend college and the technology push she found while attending the MIS STEM camp was by design, said Dr. April Reed, COB associate professor and camp organizer. The technology focus of the camp fills a void that Reed feels is not being met in area high schools.
“They (campers) need to understand that most jobs will require some technology,” Reed said. “We took them to the College of Nursing to find out how it uses manikins and technology to help train nursing students. They were in awe as the manikins blinked and moved, and how the newborn baby manikins cried.”
This year’s camp is the fourth in the past six years. Kathy Kiraly (ECU MBA ’89) previously attended and mentored several of the MIS STEM Camps. This year, she brought SAS CodeSnaps robots that introduced the campers to the basics of robotics and other aspects of technology, coding and programming.
“I’m hoping these girls see that technology is not scary; that science is not scary,” said Kiraly, a curriculum consultant at SAS. “I want them to think, ‘This is something I can do and that I can tell the computer I want the robot to navigate an obstacle course; I want it to change colors.’”
“I think the big takeaway from this camp is that they (campers) have options,” she said.
ECU leads blood pressure clinical trial using home monitoring, team approach
Researchers at ECU will lead a five-year randomized clinical trial aimed at improving blood pressure control in rural and urban patients using targeted home-based monitoring and telehealth with a health care team approach to blood pressure management.
The $5.6 million project is made possible by a contract through the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), a nonprofit research organization that is also the leading funder of patient-centered comparative clinical effectiveness research in the United States.
The project, “Carolina Consortium to Improve BP Control in Vulnerable Populations,” is led by ECU’s Dr. Doyle “Skip” Cummings, the Berbecker Distinguished Professor of Rural Medicine, a professor in public health in the Brody School of Medicine and senior faculty member in the ECU Health Disparities Center.
Project partners include UNC-Chapel Hill (including co-principal investigator Dr. Jacqueline Halladay from UNC Family Medicine), Atrium Health, the University of Alabama-Birmingham (Data Coordinating Center), Cape Fear Clinic in Wilmington and numerous other health care partners across the state. The study will also be guided by patient and community stakeholders to optimize patient acceptability of proposed strategies. Many of these partners, including Cummings, have worked together for more than a decade on projects addressing hypertension — a leading yet modifiable cardiovascular risk factor.
Nearly 70 patients in each of 13 practices, a total of more than 900 patients — from western North Carolina to the coast — will take part in the study, which is part of overarching efforts to reduce stroke and cardiovascular risk in patients with uncontrolled high blood pressure. Drs. Shivajirao Patil and Jamie Messenger will lead the ECU Family Medicine clinic’s participation.
“The intent is to study how well this new strategy for improving blood pressure control works in high-risk populations compared to usual care,” Cummings said.
That strategy includes two main parts: an ongoing at-home blood pressure monitoring portion of the study and a pro-active health care provider team to provide patient-centered blood pressure management.
“The first part is a much more intensive home telemonitoring of blood pressure in individuals who have a history of uncontrolled blood pressure in the clinic,” Cummings said. “We would be giving the patient a home blood pressure monitoring device that is telehealth-enabled. The readings will be transmitted into a server or site where we will create regular reports that will then go to the provider team. Instead of everything going through one provider, we’re going to try to create a comprehensive team approach to blood pressure management.”
Using that team approach will position the providers to assess patients whose blood pressure has gotten out of control between doctor visits and use medications and lifestyle adjustments to address the problem in hopes of reducing the risk of stroke and other cardiovascular events in at-risk patients. The team could include physicians, nurse practitioners, clinical pharmacists and other providers.
“Through partnership with Dr. Lauren Sastre in nutrition sciences here at ECU, we’re also going to use a nutritionist and some nutrition graduate students who can help us reach into the homes of these patients who have uncontrolled hypertension and provide additional counseling on dietary behaviors,” Cummings said.
A similar strategy was first used for patients in urban and suburban Minneapolis, Cummings added. The ECU-led project aims to include a more diverse range of patients with more health care challenges.
“We proposed to PCORI that we’d like to see if that same strategy will work in a place like North Carolina, where there are more minority populations, people in more socially vulnerable situations or who have more challenges with insurance coverage, and see if we can make that same strategy work to improve blood pressure control patterns here,” he said.
The project could also reveal how “generalizable” — expandable and applicable — the strategic approach could be to other patient populations as well.
Contact jstorm@reflector.com or 252-329-9587.
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