This week was Team Vitalis’s first go at a full team presentation. On Tuesday afternoon (October 7th), Team Vitalis presented their shortened PDR presentation for the first time to three other teams, multiple different coaches, and IPPD staff.

Formally, Team Vitalis provided the PDR Peer Review committee a status update on the Code Blue project on 7 October 2025. Attending faculty, staff, and invited guests included Dr. Laura Cruz Castro, Dr. Janise McNair, Dr. Christian Grant, and Arielle Barnard.

Overall, we received amazing feedback from all parties involved, and it mainly focused on two points:

1. Presentation Skills
   • Our team did a wonderful job with most presentation scores being Competent or Excellent! We need to make sure to support one another as we present which includes looking at our speaker, nodding along with them, and smiling and being understanding towards the crowd. We also need to make sure we project our voices and bring plenty of energy to keep the attention of the listener and also showcase our passion for the project!
2. Slide Composition
   • For some of our slides (specifically the House of Quality and Project Risk Table), the listeners let us know that it was harder to understand the image because of the amount of words on the screen as well as the small font. Because of this, we’ve separated those slides to make it easier on the listener to understand and read during the presentation. Here is one of the slides pictured below:

This week was a very busy week for team Vitalis! The majority of the focus was on refining the Product Architecture and developing models for our ideas created in the concept generation phase. Ezequiel developed some very elaborate and informative flow charts of the final product that we plan to continue updating as more research is done. Alongside this, Huy developed some 3D models based on Ezequiel’s plans. Below are photos of each!

This week, Vitalis had no shortage of assignments and research to do on the subject. Rigorous research, deadlines regarding our product design documentation, preparing for the career fair, and a challenging start to midterm season for our team. Nevertheless, Vitalis powered through and has made some big steps this week!

During the prior weekend, Daniel got the ball rolling for what will be the foundation for our Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) engine. Utilizing Open AI’s Whisper, Daniel created a small program that takes in audio data, converts it to a wav file, and runs it through a pre-selected Whisper model.

Eagerly, Vitalis began conducting small tests on the effectiveness on three different Whisper models by measuring word error rate (WER). We benchmarked the models in settings of Marston ambiance and isolated silence to gauge the efficacy of the specific model and microphone in real world environments.

Additionally, we began creating flow diagrams to itemize our software components to figure out how many AI models we will need in addition to statically-coded components. This aims to make it easier to allocate responsibilities during development and to make our design modular so components can be easily removed and added.

Lastly, our liaisons and coach, during this weeks meeting, were very impressed with our progress and we are perpetually excited to keep this momentum going forward into the stages of designing and prototyping.

Week 4 was a busy week for Vitalis! Some of our team members attended a Team Building Workshop hosted by Florida Power and Light, ending up with White Belts in the Six Sigma methodology. The team worked hard on developing a project roadmap and considering the many risk factors for our product. We also did a lot of brainstorming as to what our project could look like! Here’s a picture of us with one of our favorite ideas! 

Week 3! This week the team got to work on developing the Code Blue Scope of Work (SOW) and brainstormed ideas for the upcoming Product Design Specifications (PDS) review. Although it was a quick turnaround time, Vitalis came together as a team to draft preliminary documents and brainstorm design requirement and specification questions to present to our liaisons: Roseann Belser (Project Coordinator) and Stephen Belser (Owner) from JWM Engineering.

During our introductory liaison meeting, we discussed project expectations, goals, resources, and logistics to get the team working and collecting data in the UF Health Simulation Lab (SIM-LAB). We are extremely excited to meet with the SIM-LAB staff to gain more information on our project constraints and specifications.

We are so thankful to Roseann and Stephen for coming to visit us on UF campus. Vitalis is ready to take on Week 4 to finalize our SOW, PDS, and begin designing!

Welcome to the Vitalis blog site! Here we will update on weekly accomplishments and next steps throughout the 2025–2026 academic year. Vitalis is working with JWM Engineering to develop technological solutions to improve the accuracy and redundancy of systems right here in Gainesville at UF Health Shands Hospital.

Even though it’s only our first week as a team, Vitalis is already hitting the ground running! We’ve held our initial meeting where we assigned roles and brainstormed our team name and logo. We also met with our coach, Dr. Laura Cruz Castro, a data science instructor specializing in applied AI and human-technology interactions, and reviewed a preliminary draft of our Scope of Work.

Next week, we plan to meet with our liaison, Roseann Belser, from JWM Engineering to discuss project details and design requirements. Vitalis is very excited to be working on this project and can’t wait to start exploring solutions!