In high school, I worked as a nursing assistant at a nursing home for children with cerebral palsy. I saw problems all around me that needed to be fixed - wheelchairs falling apart, problems with wrist-worn alert devices, eating utensils that were unusable - which led me to pursue biomedical engineering in undergraduate. It was there that I joined a research lab focused on developing new wearable devices for healthcare. I was able to be involved in many projects, most notably, developing the electronics behind wrist-worn sensors for asthma monitoring and an EEG-based sleep monitoring wearable device. The data science / software development came later, during my PhD and opened up a whole new world of using these wearable devices for monitoring chronic diseases. Now I work on a variety of projects using wearables to detect chronic diseases and I am helping to build a community of developers creating insights into health with wearables through the Digital Biomarker Discovery Pipeline (DBDP).