R&D Internship

My mission

At the end of my first year at Télécom, I did a (paid) summer internship at Mellisim.

Mellisim is a french startup funded by the company ValoTec, that aims to create :

• a fully disposable glucose biosensor specifically designed to be affordable for Type 2 Diabetic patients

• a dedicated application on the patient’s smartphone with embedded AI diabetes specialist expertise and coaching skills  to support T2D patients’ specific needs.

When I was in Mellisim, much of the team focus was still on the development of the biosensor and it's "applicator". I was therefore responsible for the R&D work investigating how to develop the dedicated application. I worked in full autonomy, on-site, with weekly reports to my supervisor.

My work

I've signed a non-disclosure agreement with Mellisim for this internship, also I tell here the exact results of my work.

I can frame my role at Mellisim as "investigating algorithms that would be used to give feedback and advise diabetic patients on their (useful and harmful) lifestyle habits".

I divided my work as follows:

• Data cleaning of a clinical trial that Mellisim conducted with diabetic patients: modeling assumptions, outlier detection, missing value imputation, ... Working with python (Pandas). I used this data throughout my whole internship to train and test my algorithms. (1 week)

• R&D of AI algorithms to predict useful insights from patients glucose and actimetric data: when they have meals, snacks or drinks, when they exercise, when they sleep, ... (2 weeks)

• Reading of papers and scientific sources about diabetics to link data insights with useful advice for patients. Implementation of some common metrics used by physicians to assess diabetes evolution. (<1 week)

• R&D of an AI algorithm to detect habits (= patterns) in their eating/exercising routine, and explaining why it recommends that. (2 weeks)

• The last few days: organizing the structure of the documentation I had written during all those weeks, explaining everything I had done/decided/hypothesized, assessing that everything was reproducible, etc. (<1 week)

What I take away from this internship

My supervisor and the CEO were very satisfied with my work (references available upon request). For me, this was my first real professional experience, and the main thing I take away is that my experience working on (numerous) personal projects transfers well to the professional background.

On a technical viewpoint, this internship helped me gain better comprehension of a lot of ML frameworks, of project management, data quality, etc. I considered this internship and the autonomy I had an opportunity for taking the time to understand every little think that I felt I misunderstood.

Gallery

Here are some illustrations of my work at Mellisim: