• ICORD is a UBCxVGH research organization that researches spinal cord injuries through rehab, artificial vertebrae,  NIRS, and more. 

  • I worked part time Dr. Tania Lam's lab which is rehabilitation / kinesiology based using exoskeletons, and magnetic / electrical stimulation. 

• MATLAB Projects to process EMG data in response to magnetic & electrical stimulation & exoskeleton's lokomat and ekso 

Project Summary: PDE Modelling of Blood Flow to a Tumour in the Aorta below the heart & Analysis

I following the guidance of transport phenomena in biological systems by George A Truskey I studied the governing equations and solved them and found appropriate constants to use for the project and found the velocity of blood like therapeutics through aortic tumours to determine the time that the therapeutic has to bind to the cancer receptors. The motivation of this project comes from the lack of case studies for aortic tumours and the 5 year survival rate being 3.5%. The goal was to determine the amount of time the drug had to bind to the tumour once inside, through this I learned of many limitations of the model and was familiarized with the approach to biophysical models. 

The project began with learning the how NNs work and understanding theory behind concepts such as stochastic gradient descent , the loss function and NN structure.  Finally, using tensorflow API I was able to use the MNIST number data to have a neural network that is able to recognize a hand written digit. After running model.fit() multiple times an accuracy of 95.04% was achieved. 

What:

I have been apart of MINT's electrical team developing an electroencephalography (EEG). I later came to lead the electrical team's 2 projects, a bipedal robotics project and the EEG. I learned analog circuit design and my foundations of function generators, oscilloscopes, and DC power supplies. Now I teach the project members PCB design in altium designer and teach them circuit design. 

Future:

The long term goal is to train an ML model on the EEG to remotely control the robot. 

Prev Comp:

We also competed in NeuroTechX where I worked on an expanding cube with actuation. 

Learned Signal Processing and theory for fourier analysis in python

Data Source: Past Collections from Student Team

Muscle dominance in humans is a well known concept with the vast majority of people having one side of their body stronger, capable of dynamic movement to a higher degree, and to have better balance/control. However in the field of biomechanics muscle dominance has barely been studied. 

This concept is why the body tends to depend/lean more on one side of their body due to a strength advantage. Such an effect is often noticeable during weight training, however it is has not been well studied and there is conflicting evidence. For example, there is evidence that suggests we place more weight on our left than our right regardless of which side of the body is dominant(1). There is also evidence that shows the force output of one arm is greater than the other(3.)

Our project sought out to determine the role of muscle dominance between arms in resistance training to try an and answer the a piece of the question. "What role does muscle dominance play in the biomechanics of the human body?".