From predicting prediabetes to helping students set goals, Woodbury siblings are master app developers

Mary Divine, Pioneer Press
·6 min read

The first mobile app that Coolsjes and Riddhi Singhvi developed helped users predict whether they have prediabetes.

The Singhvis’ second app, called SMART Planner, allows users to track their progress through goal milestones, set reminders, schedule evaluations from mentors and integrate rewards for achieving a goal.

The first app was chosen as one of the winners in the Congressional District App Challenge in 2021. The second app, developed last year, was one of the 2022 winners.

The Woodbury siblings will travel to Washington, D.C., this spring for the #HouseofCode Capitol Hill Reception, and their entry will be featured in a display in the U.S. Capitol.

A coder and a designer

Coolsjes, a 10th-grader at Stillwater Area High School, and Riddhi, an eighth-grader at Stillwater Middle School, share the app-developing duties.

Coolsjes said he takes on most of the coding; Riddhi does all of the design and layout work.

“I’m not very good at the art part,” said Coolsjes, 14. “I can’t cut on the lines. I can’t exactly color in between the lines. The art’s not exactly my thing, but that’s what my sister loves.”

Said Riddhi: “You should have seen his sixth-grade projects. He’s half color-blind.”

The Singhvis spent several months developing the SMART Planner app, working on the project after homework and piano practice.

“We don’t want to make it super-stressful,” he said. “We want to just get our schoolwork done first so we’re not multitasking, so our minds are fully on this. It was not a walk in the park, but it also wasn’t necessarily impossible.”

The students use the goal-setting app to “help us achieve what we want to achieve,” Coolsjes said.

In Coolsjes’ case, that is maintaining a 3.85-plus grade-point average this semester. Riddhi, 12, who swims for Stillwater Area High School swim coach Brian Luke, wants to cut down her time in the 50-yard freestyle.

“It’s for students like us who want to have a sense of direction when we’re going into something,” she said. “You don’t want to be losing track when trying to achieve something and trying to figure out a way to get on track, when you could have just started on track and kept on that path.”

Milestones and rewards

The SMART Planner app — SMART stands for “Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound” — has students set a long-term goal that is split into milestones and then further split into tasks. Once a student completes a milestone, he or she can be evaluated or receive a reward.

Riddhi hopes to complete her milestone in August — before the start of the next swim season — and receive as her reward a trip to the Mall of America.

Coolsjes will soon know whether he achieved his GPA goal; the semester ends Tuesday.

“For mine, the end date is January 31, 2023, because that’s the last day, really, that they’re entering grades in,” Coolsjes said. “Finals week is going on right now, which is my favorite week of the entire year. I love having so many exams all at the same time.”

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Coolsjes also picked a trip to the Mall of America as his reward. “I was thinking about what would make me feel good after getting a 3.85 GPA,” he said. “What’s going to motivate me to reach that? A trip to the Mall of America. I haven’t been there in a while, and who doesn’t want to go there?”

The siblings are already making plans for the 2.0 version of the app, which they hope will be a free resource for students and help them make the most of their education and plan for their future.

Among the improvements they’d like to make: Add the Google Calendar feature to keep tasks, appointments and evaluations in one place.

“That would make it easier to flag conflicts/overlaps between various planned activities such as a sports meet scheduled on the same day and time as an exam, prompting the user to set a priority,” they wrote in their application.

Prediabetes predictor

Coolsjes and Riddhi’s previous app, called “D-PREDICT: An Artificial Intelligence-based Prediabetes Prediction Application,” takes physical and behavioral inputs — like loss of hair, irritation and obesity — and predicts if the person has prediabetes.

The app has been able to predict prediabetes with more than 98 percent accuracy — “a remarkable feat given that published research at the time showed only 85 percent accuracy,” said their father, Sanjay Singhvi.

The siblings said they were interested in researching prediabetes because a family member has Type 2 diabetes.

They learned how to code at school, at summer camps at the Science Museum of Minnesota and by viewing online tutorials at Khan Academy, a nonprofit organization that provides free online learning tools and courses for students.

Last weekend, Riddhi was named grand champion at DaVinci Fest, the Stillwater Area School District festival that promotes student art, science and film projects.

Her project, “CRISPR-ing Up the Genes: A Tale of Two Experiments,” involved creating a streptomycin-resistant E. coli bacteria that is also fluorescent.

Here’s how she explains it: “I used CRISPR cas9 engineering to modify E. coli genes at two different places at the same time with two separate DNA templates. I wanted to see if they were mutually exclusive, or did they affect each other? The two edits were mutually exclusive, and they did both work on the E. coli cells, which is what I had predicted.” Apparently the judges of the contest understood and applauded.

Proud parents

Sanjay Singhvi is the owner and CEO of CompuTerra, a computer consulting company that specializes in creating and managing public-safety systems, environmental engineering projects and health care systems; Mitra Singhvi is the former CEO of Cara Clinicals and runs a consulting company that specializes in health care.

“One of our family mottos is from Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase,” Sanjay Singhvi said. “‘If you can, you should.'”

“I just love the fact that they get along and like each other,” Mitra Singhvi said. “They pretend at times that they don’t, but they really do.”

Coolsjes, however, takes great pleasure in pointing out that he will always be “two years, 23 days, 23 hours and 15 minutes” older.

“How many seconds? I didn’t record seconds when I was born!” he said.

“I’m always going to be winning. They say practice makes perfect, and I’ve practiced longer. I’ll be a better debater, better mathematician, better speaker.”

Don’t count on Riddhi to agree.

Both students list Spotify as one of their favorite apps. What kind of music do they like to listen to?

“2010s pop,” Coolsjes said. “Like Halsey.”

What kind of music does Riddhi like? “Not Halsey.”

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