My project goes over the biology of chronic kidney disease, including what CKD is, definitions to understand, the prevalence of it, the signs and symptoms, and the main causes. Then I go over the nutrition guidelines of the disease and the nutrients important to regulate, including sodium, protein, fats and whole grain carbohydrates, potassium, and phosphorus. Next, I write about recipes that I modify to be kidney-friendly and make nutrient analyses for each original recipe and each modified recipe. Finally, I made a video of myself cooking and trying two of the modified recipes.

Spatial audio can be especially useful for directing human attention. However, delivering spatial audio through speakers, rather than headphones that deliver audio directly to the ears, produces the issue of crosstalk, where sounds from each of the two speakers reach the opposite ear, inhibiting the spatialized effect. A research team at Meteor Studio has developed an algorithm called Xblock that solves this issue using a crosstalk cancellation technique. This thesis project expands upon the existing Xblock IoT system by providing a way to test the accuracy of the directionality of sounds generated with spatial audio. More specifically, the objective is to determine whether the usage of Xblock with smart speakers can provide generalized audio localization, which refers to the ability to detect a general direction of where a sound might be coming from. This project also expands upon the existing Xblock technique to integrate voice commands, where users can verbalize the name of a lost item using the phrase, “Find [item]”, and the IoT system will use spatial audio to guide them to it.