Medella: A Health and Wellness Application; The Political Implications of Amazon Go Stores

Medella is a web application that streamlines the process for developing and distributing wellness information to companies and individual users. Through this platform, administrators can easily create blog posts, video posts, quizzes, and newsletters that can be sent out to subscribed users. The website also displays engagement information including which businesses have registered and with what types of information users are interacting. Prior to creating this application, our project’s client would create each type of content through separate platforms, and he would manually track the engagement data. Our web application automates this work for the client, which in turn increases the reach and scalability of his work.

This STS project explores the idea of automating the retail checkout process. It explores the development of the Amazon Go stores, grocery stores that use “Just Walk Out” technology to check out. This thesis claims that these stores are embedded with power relations that disadvantage low-wage workers by showing that Amazon was too focused on the technology while developing the stores and that cashiers will likely lose their jobs and be unable to find other employment. The purpose of this paper is to point out that while the technology itself is impressive, we must also consider the power relations embedded in the Amazon Go stores and how they affect underserved populations.

School of Engineering and Applied Science
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
Technical Advisor: Ahmed Ibrahim
STS Advisor: Benjamin Laugelli
Technical Team Members: Audrey Fifer, James Hamil, Grace Huang, Jackson Kennedy, David Mehani, Bernice Wu