iSchool Capstone

2015

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Green Initiatives at the Space Needle - Workflow Digitization

Space Needle, LLC is seeking a move to a greener and more efficient electronic billing, invoicing, and records sharing system within the organization, with ability to share outside the organization. The company was seeking a digital process and invoice approval system to convert manual entry and workflow procedures and replace the antiquated format and practices already in place. This Capstone investigated emerging industry technologies surrounding electronic receiving, invoicing, and workflow with particular consideration of processes in document management and department budgeting and approval. Project impact includes elimination of misplaced files or invoices, instant document retrieval and sharing across the company, and a fit with the company’s new Green Initiatives Mission.
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Healthcare Cost Transparency

Healthcare costs in the U.S. have skyrocketed from $1.4 trillion in 2000 to $2.9 trillion in 2014 according to Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Our project – All-Payer Claims Database (APCD) Healthcare Cost Transparency, sponsored by the Washington Health Alliance (WHA) – may be a solution in healthcare cost containment and service improvement. APCDs collect de-identified medical claims data including clinical, financial, and utilization data. Several states have already passed a law to mandate an APCD, and Washington State is on the verge of passing the same law. WHA has the opportunity to be selected as the lead organization as the state authorized APCD administrator. Our project evaluates hosting options – in-house versus the cloud – and builds a functional but scaled-down APCD in Azure cloud to determine its feasibility. The result of this project will be to arm WHA with the knowledge to make informed decisions on the best APCD hosting option.
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Improvise

People love meeting new friends. There are some applications in current market that can help people to date strangers. They are effective in some ways, but target users are limited and the matching and scheduling process is not efficient enough. In order to provide a better service to the users, we created an application that can both simplify user operations and provide more ways to meet new friends. Improvise is a Mobile application working on iOS platform that can help users to meet new friends sharing mutual interests. The best part of using Improvise is that users can skip the boring process of filling out long profiles and scheduling a formal date after slow matching. Just send out an invitation or accept one in a finger flip, your new friends, who listen to same interest channel, may already wait for you outside the tennis court when you park your car.
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Impuls, find your moment

Impuls is a map based event location service that strives to provide users with all the information they need in order to find local events. People shouldn't need to spend hours planning a simple evening, and they're too busy to think about it several days in advance. There is a better way to plan a night out, connect with friends, and just have fun. No more scouring endless websites to find local events. No more hours wasted on tedious planning details. With Impuls, users can find events easily, see full event details, filter events based on their interests and availability, and even post their own events to the map. Impuls is the first map based event location service that is free to use and targeted towards the individual’s spontaneous nature. Finally, people can embrace their spontaneity and feel confident that waiting until the last minute won’t result in failed evenings.
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In-Vehicle Information System Design

Drivr is a rapidly expanding personal chauffeur service which commands a fleet of Tesla Model-S vehicles but previously lacked a consolidated system for logistical planning and execution. To solve this problem, I designed front-end interfaces for both drivers and dispatchers in addition to a back-end database by following the user-centered design process. For drivers, I utilized the Tesla’s 17-inch screen in the dashboard to design a low-cost solution which runs in the vehicles’ browser. For dispatchers, I designed a web interface which provides a number of much needed flexibility options. Testing has proven that this system will not only improve the capacity of Drivr to provide superior service, but because it is so much more efficient, effective, and satisfying to use, stakeholders, dispatchers, and drivers alike expect the new system to make Drivr an even better place to work.
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Indigenizing the Digital Divide

Throughout this project, our goal was to gather enough data in order to create a greater sense of awareness regarding the technological gap between American Indian and Alaska Native communities and quality network connectivity. Past experience has shown that the coverage is spotty and mostly non-existent in certain towns within our research area—White Swan, specifically. The team used online sources to find coverage maps over the Yakama Indian Reservation and conducted a site visit to the land itself in order to check actual coverage and gather real-time connection readings. Our findings indicate that the big carriers (such as Verizon) are essentially not advertising the entire truth as they offer spotty data coverage. Next steps are to revisit the Nation and deliver this report for them to use as a preliminary study for their own use.
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Information Needs of Health Care Purchasers

Health care costs are high for both consumers and the organizations that provide health care plans to their employees. Washington Health Alliance (WHA) works with organizations throughout the state of Washington, both private and public, to help reduce the overall cost of health care. Their goals include reducing price, overuse of services, and reducing underuse of effective care. HR representatives from WHA member organizations were surveyed to understand how they create a health care benefit strategy for their organization and how they communicate the strategy and plan with their employees. Among approximately 130 recipients there was a 12% response rate. The survey responses were used to create a sample health care plan purchaser persona, which can be used by WHA to prompt discussions with HR representatives about creating health care strategies and communicating their strategy and plan with their employees.
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InstaCook

While cooking we spend a majority of time looking for recipes online and then matching it with our available kitchen inventory. This effort takes significant time and essentially results in cooking the same meals or spending money and eating out at a restaurant. It has become a reoccurring problem and one of the major motivations for our project. InstaCook, suggests recipes to the users based on the items they already have in the kitchen. Novice cooks will be able to use the application while cooking and operate it through voice commands and avoid the hassle of using a smart device with their messy hands. It empowers our users to experiment with new and variety of easy to cook recipes. Not only will this lead to a nutritious diet but will also minimize food wastage, as it effectively maintains a kitchen inventory leading to a decrease in expenditure.
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Internet of Everything - Grapevine

Home automation for years has been the domain of home installers, outfitting wealthy consumers with expensive setups. Now, there are companies like Nest, Hue, Dropcam, Honeywell and Belkin that let people individually control their lights, locks, cameras, garage doors or anything with a plug. The biggest challenge here is the steep learning curve for people to setup and use multiple applications with very different user interfaces. In short, it is a nightmare to make all these devices work as a single unified system. Our project – Grapevine, is a one‐stop solution, which aims to simplify this process of home automation and make your entire apartment building intelligent. Grapevine will allow residents to completely personalize and automate their apartments, while also enabling apartment managers to conveniently manage processes like security, lighting or maintenance for the whole building. Grapevine will offer complete control, convenience and security through a simple, well‐designed mobile application.
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Internet of Things: Grocery Store Operations Manager

A typical grocery store in your neighborhood grapples with the challenges of high operating costs, narrow margins and losses in expired inventory. Achieving incremental gains in optimizing inventory stocking, efficient consumption of utilities and avoiding wastages will result in huge impact on the bottom line of locally operated grocery stores. Our project ventures in this space to provide a facility management platform for store managers to centrally monitor performance of various devices in the store and collect insights for operational intelligence. We have designed a centralized dashboard for store managers to connect, configure and monitor performance of typical devices that you find in a grocery store. The dashboard can be used for fault and configuration management to minimize MTTR (mean time to response). Data is collected by a polling mechanism which queries devices about their statuses. The data collected can be used for rendering trending graphs and generate reports for forecasting and proactively detect issues before they arise.