Webinars | First Experience!

Attending My First Webinars

As part of a school assessment, I had to source for and attend 2 IT/technology related webinars.

After hours of searching for webinars that both intersted me and fit my schedule, I finally decided on 2: Postman 101, and ACM Keynote: New Ways of Thinking of the Mobile Phone for Healthcare and the current Pandemic.

Unfortuntely however, a day before Postman 101, I was shocked to discover that the webinar timings I had been looking at were not in SGT. So what I thought was 5pm and 4pm was actually 1am and 10pm (┬┬﹏┬┬)

Anyway, I still attended them because I was really interested in the topics and didn't want to spend another 3 hours looking for more webinars! @_@

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Postman 101

Insights

In the webinar, Postman Developer Educator Sue Smith went through the basics of the Postman API Platform and things you could do with it. It was similar to a school lecture in the sense that she went through slides, demonstrated the features using the Postman app, and gave time for questions at the end.

Other than the basic GET and POST requests that I had been using for various modules in school like PRG2 and WEB, she also explained “Collections”, which is basically a library of related requests that you can either create yourself or import a “template” using Postman.

Templates are collections that have been created by other Postman users and shared to the community, meaning any other Postman users will be able to import and use it. I found this feature quite useful as it would make it easier for everybody in future group projects where everyone needs to use the same API requests.

Another interesting thing was the “API Network”, which is basically where companies submit their own Postman collections. With good documentation by the companies, it becomes a lot easier for developers to integrate third-party APIs by said companies into client apps.

Another thing that I found useful was “Variables”, which are just variables that you can set and use anywhere on Postman, with the option to change the scope of course. This helps with a number of things. The first thing I can think of is development speed, where instead of typing “https://3589dfde-f398-45cd-88eb-b0fa0192fc3f.mock.pstmn.io/matches”, you could just have “{{url}}/matches”, with the long url saved as {{url}}.

Other things I can think of include improving readability, as well as convenience. If you set the scope to within the collection, you can also use it to store “password123” as {{key}} and use it to perform requests which require a key.

Finally, she also went through “Scripts”, which you can use to run all sorts of tests in JavaScript after a request executes. You can even use this to visualise data by creating visualisers.

Impact

By attending this webinar, I learnt to use some of Postman’s most useful features. As such, I am now able to make use of them when developing apps that make use of Web APIs, speeding up the development process. I will also be able to take full advantage of collections made by companies as well as other users.

With mobile becoming more and more prevalent in today’s context, if mobile apps are combined with Web APIs, it could make so much relevant information available to users, right at their fingertips. This lines up with what I plan to do in the future, so this webinar experience has definitely helped me take steps towards my future goal.

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ACM Keynote: New Ways of Thinking of the Mobile Phone for Healthcare and the current Pandemic

Insights

This webinar was actually the first keynote of the AI for Good Global Summit’s Webinar Series, presented by Dr. Shwetak Patel. He is the Director of Health for Google and a professor at University of Washington. This time, it was more like a talk than a school lecture, as he shared about the work that his lab had been doing for the last few years. There was also time allotted at the end for Q&A.

The webinar focused on how pre-existing sensors in mobile phones today could be used for healthcare purposes. Sensors like the microphone, speaker, camera, and even gyroscope and accelerometer – sensors that most phones nowadays have.

I won’t go into detail for all the examples that were shared by Patel during the webinar, because he covered a lot and many biological terms were thrown around, but I will talk about one of my favourite ones.

SpiroSmart, one of the first technologies that his team worked on, is one that is very relevant right now, especially with the current pandemic. It’s a software that uses just the microphone of a mobile phone – no additional hardware – to monitor one’s lung function.

In clinical settings, a device called a spirometer is typically used to measure a patient’s lung function. How it works is that it has a small hole that you blow into, and there’s a turbine inside it that measures how much air is being blown into the spirometer. This is then integrated over time to determine the health of the patient’s lungs.

SpiroSmart on the other hand, makes use of a sound produced when you blow air out from your lungs called “vocal cord resonance”. When there are obstructions within the patient’s respiratory system, the vocal cord resonance will change, and according to Patel’s team’s clinical data collection, the resonance was actually proportional to the air flow coming from the patient.

Based on this correlation, SpiroSmart is able to detect the air flow coming from a patient’s lungs, using just the phone’s microphone. This data can then be relayed to the patient in the form of a graph and even be sent to their doctor for analysis, all without having to physically visit the clinic!

Impacts

After attending this webinar, my view of the mobile phone had completely changed. Other than SpiroSmart, Patel also shared so many more interesting ways that you could use the mobile phone’s sensors to perform health checks! It was truly an eye-opening experience and has led me to wonder what other creative ways the mobile phone sensors could be used, be it for healthcare or otherwise.

I’ve definitely become more open-minded after attending the ACM keynote, and believe that the valuable insights gained from it will help me in future.

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Overall, attending the two webinars has been a very enriching experience for me. Because I’d intentionally picked webinars with different natures, one more educational and the other more inspirational and insightful, I feel like I’ve benefited in both areas. I honestly did not expect to find either of the webinars to be as interesting as they turned out to be, especially the ACM keynote which showcased so many interesting and creative ideas!

Once again, I’m glad that I was given the chance to experience attending the webinars, and will definitely find the time to attend more in the future! ~\(≧▽≦)/~