For the first half of Block 4B’s meeting on February 28th, the class discussed plans for what the website and web application will look like and plans for actually making it. During the second half, the class broke into their groups. The data group continued to go through data for their report. The design group brainstormed sketches for the appearance of the website. The visual aspect of the website will most likely be designed on “Justinmind”, a website that enables web page creation without having to code the visual components in HTML. The coding group is working on downloading programs for making the server. The coding group is now primarily working in Ruby and Ruby on Rails.
-Matt LaRosa
Tuesday, February 28, 2017
Saturday, February 25, 2017
Over the break, a couple members of the programming group met with multiple software engineers to discuss web application development. Currently, the plan is to develop a web app which accesses Fitbit sleep data and displays that information to the user on a website. Therefore, the group realized they needed to learn the best tools and approach to implementing this idea. Throughout this week, members of the group learned how to access Fitbit data, constructed a basic diagram displaying functionality for the web application components, and completed introductory courses in programming in Ruby and using Ruby on Rails on Codecademy. Ruby on Rails was decided as the best approach to developing the web app and the members began to install the appropriate files to progress with this step. The next steps for this group are to continue learning more about Ruby on Rails in order to develop the backend side of the web application and also to begin laying out the website using a wireframe program in order to determine the functionality of various pages and features.
-Sophie Smith
Thursday, February 23, 2017
The data analysis group studied the trend of the number of fatigue-related trucking accidents. We analyzed raw data from a survey taken on trucking accidents between 2001 and 2009. The group found the percent of accidents caused by fatigue for each year and created a linear regression analysis. 2008 is an outlier and therefore it was omitted from the next scatterplot we created, which can be seen below. The new scatterplot has a downward linear trend line which could perhaps be accounted for by the implementation of electronic log books. However, the correlation is not strong and there is still work to be done to reduce fatigue-related trucking accidents. Based on this trend line, we extrapolated the data for predicted crashes for this year. A margin of error was calculated for each year described above and then the average margin of error was calculated. Based on the average margin of error and the linear trend line, we calculated between 28,110 and 40,249 deadly trucking accidents caused by fatigue for this year. This number was calculated based on an estimate population size of 2 million commercial truckers on the road this year.
We also compared the Fitbit Flex 2 and Jawbone UP3. We had each team member wear both devices on opposite wrists for two nights. We then recorded the time slept for the Fitbit, UP3 and the time each person fell asleep and woke up, which was based on alarms and recorded bed-times. We then compared the accuracy of both devices. The results are shown below. The Fitbit is clearly more accurate.
-Hayden Meaney
Saturday, February 18, 2017
Class 4B last met on Friday the 17th of February. The class will not meet this coming week as school is out for February break. Project Manager Matt and PR Person Chris spent the majority of class meeting with individual team members to discuss short-term goals and progress mad since the last one-on-one meeting. The html group continued to work on creating a website. Their group will include more members soon; several team members are tasked with learning html over break. The web app group scheduled a meeting with a mentor over the break in order to discuss how to best go about creating the web app. The data analysis group is preparing a report to present to the class. 4B is on schedule and moving into the prototyping phase of their project.
Friday, February 17, 2017
At their last meeting, Class 4B began class by responding to an email from Seeing Machines, specifically Guardian, the branch of Seeing Machines that deals with trucking accidents caused by drowsiness. Guardian uses face tracking algorithms to monitor driver fatigue. 4B asked their team questions about how they went about creating their web application, how they tested their product’s effectiveness, and how they market their product to trucking companies. After brainstorming questions for the email response, 4B broke into smaller groups. Project manager Matt Chmiel and Jack Tanny both worked on the email response. The html group continued working on creating a website. The second coding group is researching how to create a web application. The data analysis group continued to look through spreadsheets and worked on a report to present to the class.
Tuesday, February 14, 2017
Block 4B’s meeting on February 13th was shorter than usual due to a 2-hour delay. The survey group is compiling a survey to ask civilians. They are hoping to start distributing them by the next meeting. The data group is working on a report concerning the crash spreadsheets sent to them by an actuary. One of the programming groups has finished learning html on Codecademy and is working on making the project’s website in html. They are also responding to an email from a professional programmer and local Saratoga resident.
-Matt LaRosa
-Matt LaRosa
Friday, February 10, 2017
Block 4B only met once for a full meeting this past week due to school cancellations and school functions.
In order to support the claim that sleep induced trucking accidents are an issue, we have created an anonymous survey directed towards both commercial drivers and civilian drivers. Some of the questions are: how many accidents have they been in? How many were sleep induced? And finally, in their opinion, is falling asleep while driving a pressing issue? Currently, two trucking companies have agreed to administer the survey. We will continue to contact more companies to help further support our problem statement. As for the civilian drivers, we will have a random group complete the survey. By having both civilian and commercial drivers take the survey we will be able to see how the issue impacts drivers differently.
The data analysis group is reviewing spreadsheets sent to them by an actuary. These spreadsheets contain information on big-rig truck accidents from several years. From these spreadsheets, they hope to calculate the cost benefits and potential lives saved by preventing accidents.
-Megan Varcoe
-Megan Varcoe
Tuesday, February 7, 2017
Hello! The last month has been a busy time for class 2B. In the past few weeks we have decided to pursue another pathway with our project. The issues we were facing with our previous approach seemed too great to tackle, given both our resources, and our time frame; as a result we have decided to pursue an app/website based approach. We recently held a focus group with local cyclists in order to pick out our feature set, and are currently posting polls to web forums. We hope this app will be able to provide cyclists with the safest possible routes using an algorithm which will consider traffic data and user feedback. We would greatly appreciate your help, please take our poll, which can be found here. Thank you!
Sincerely,
2B
Sincerely,
2B
Friday, February 3, 2017
Class 4B continued to work in their smaller groups. The coding group is now broken into three sections. One group is learning “HTML” language on Codecademy in order to design a website for the Fitbit app to link to. Another group is coding the actual app in Android Studio. Android Studio is coded in “Java”, which means the first version of the app will be tested only on Samsung phones as apple products work on a type of “R” language. The last group is researching options for a database web hosting service, as the website should store data sent to it from the Fitbit app. The data analysis group is looking through an extensive big-rig crash spreadsheet in order to find further correlations between fatigue and crashes, as well as calculating potential benefits, costs and lives saved, of reducing these types of crashes.
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