The team

Four engineers.
One medical-grade platform.

Phoenix Ascend is a senior capstone at Texas A&M, built in partnership with Medtronic Diabetes. We own the system end-to-end — device protocols, cloud infra, clinical UX — and we ship it.

KB
Project Manager Kian Bobrow

Keeps the schedule honest and the scope realistic. Runs sponsor syncs, release planning, and the weekly review with Medtronic.

GitHub ↗Planning
MM
Cybersecurity Mason Morse

Owns threat modeling, Auth0 integration, RLS policy design, and the encryption posture across every layer of the platform.

GitHub ↗Auth · RLS
GM
Software Engineer Grant McNatt

Builds the FastAPI surface, the TimescaleDB schemas, and the synthetic data pipeline that keeps the test suite grounded in reality.

GitHub ↗API · Data
RR
UI / UX Ryan Rudin

Designs the clinical Portal, the Athena trial workbench, and the shared component system that holds them together — down to the last pixel.

GitHub ↗Design · Frontend
Our year

From kickoff to capstone showcase.

Phoenix Ascend started in August 2025 with a deliberately open brief: build a modern cloud platform for connected-device telemetry — the way you'd build it in industry. Here's what that looked like, month by month.

Aug 2025

Kickoff

Team formed. Medtronic sponsors scoped the brief: real telemetry, real scale, real clinical vocabulary.

Oct 2025

Four-layer architecture locked

Device · API · App · Data. Each layer independently deployable, testable, and hardened.

Dec 2025

First end-to-end reading

A simulated CGM wrote a glucose reading through the ingest path into TimescaleDB and rendered on the Portal in 1.4 seconds.

Feb 2026

Portal beta, Athena supporting verification

First clinician walkthroughs of the Portal. Athena parsing trial exports alongside, giving the engineering team a second opinion against raw device data.

Apr 2026

Capstone showcase

Platform in multi-AZ posture. Sub-2-second ingest-to-dashboard. HIPAA-ready audit trail.

Roadmap

Where Phoenix Ascend is headed.

An active project with clear next steps — cloud migration, clinical safety, and interoperability.

Now · Q2 2026 Shipping
  • AWS cloud migration — Pi 5 → production-grade infra
  • Dexcom v3 integration — OAuth2 flow for real-time EGVs
  • Portal cohort views for multi-patient oversight
  • Batched CGM ingest with configurable alert thresholds
Next · Q3 2026 Building
  • Clinical safety monitoring with threshold-based alerting
  • Observability — structured logging, metrics, tracing
  • PHI encryption at rest across all tables
  • Data quality monitoring and validation pipelines
Future Researching
  • ML glucose forecasting and trend prediction
  • FHIR export for health-system interop
  • Human factors validation studies
  • Additional device connector support

We set out to build it
the way we'd build it in industry.
Then we did.

Phoenix Ascend · Team Texas A&M × Medtronic Diabetes · 2026
See it for yourself

Open the Portal.
Watch it update.

The clinician Portal shows a patient's last 60 minutes of glucose live. Athena, our internal trial workbench, parses a raw export off your own disk.

Open Athena ↗ Open Portal ↗