For the entire school year, the SLHS computer club has been working together on various projects to help improve technology for various organizations and groups.
“We’ve worked with Cedar Crest College in the development of a fingerprint analysis software,” club adviser Mr. Brad Siesko said. “And that was [The Computer Science Club’s] first project [they] worked on.”
Now, the club has turned its attention to aiding in the development of a revolutionary device that could potentially benefit people all over the country, and even the world.
“A medical device company is working on a glucose sensor for critical care patients.” Mr. Barry Feldman, product design consultant for the company Vytrace, said. “That’s a very important thing to measure, and these days a lot of companies are working on ways to measure that, but it seems to be very hard to do.”
The Vytrace product is a cutting edge piece of software that calculates glucose levels in ICU patients through colored lights in the software, which corresponds to a spectrometer, which could accurately measure glucose.
“The company doesn’t have funding yet,” Feldman said. “It’s just a few people working on this technology, and working right now to try and get venture capitals to invest money in the company, so we can be funded and start our operations and develop the technology further, so it could be commercialized and available for ICUs.”
As big as the work accomplished could potentially be, the club members are gaining other valuable skills as they collaborate.
“They’re really getting experience working together on a group project,” Siesko said. “It’s also a great experience for students to have in a high school setting working with the community in developing something that could really help a lot of people. Tying all that stuff together is one great opportunity for everybody.”
“From the technical standpoint,” Feldman said. “It’s figuring out how to do something they haven’t done before. They’ve worked with computers and software, obviously, but they’re working with a new software, they’re working with new devices, so they’re getting a little flavor for what some of these devices do.”
