This story is written by Grade 10 student Anna, who elaborated on the background, process, and inspiration behind her design of the device that can evaluate a user's cardiovascular risk and has been showcased at the International Science & Engineering Fair in Sichuan this year.

This project was inspired by my grandpa, who was a cardiovascular disease patient who dreaded visiting the hospital. He complained about how he didn’t want exposure to sick people and how time-consuming each visit was. This often delayed treatment and exacerbated his illness, which put our family under a lot of stress. Upon further research, I found that conventional CVD diagnoses are costly, inconvenient, and invasive, which discourages many people from seeking medical help. Thus, I aim to increase the accessibility of heart healthcare for people, making them more aware of their heart conditions. 

This project required a wide array of skill sets that I obtained throughout the course of working on this device. I learned about how to program, train algorithms, and assemble hardware pieces together for my device. The process of seeing machine learning algorithms becoming gradually more accurate by itself amazes me, making me aware of the complicated tasks that AI can break down in the future. The greatest achievement for me was actually assembling a legitimate device that can demonstrate its intended functionalities of evaluating cardiovascular disease risk (i.e. my grandpa had actually used it and the results aligned with the doctor’s diagnoses), making it more than just a concept or idea. This project made me realize how much potential young people have in solving global and societal issues, and with the help of AI, the potential for more people to develop innovative would increase.