Adventures of an EngiNerd: Life as a Biomedical Engineer

Well, I said I didn’t want to define myself as solely an engineer on this blog, and yet, this is the first picture I post. Seems a good way to define myself as a nerd, anyway! This picture is me in the lab during an experiment I did last week for one of my coworkers. I have found myself in similar setups more times than I can remember. And I’ve set up these electrodes on other students/friends/dutiful husband many more times than that! The picture gives a good glimpse into life in a biomedical engineering lab.

I never really thought I’d be an engineer growing up; the idea of engineering seemed really boring when I thought of it, which wasn’t very often. But a combination of liking high school biology, plus math and physics, eventually led me to stumble on the specific field of biomedical engineering. Many people are not familiar with what this means ~ while they may understand that civil engineers design buildings and electrical engineers design electronics, what the heck is a biomedical engineer? Well, it basically means designing things that interact with the human body. This can include a huge range of things like imaging devices, pacemakers, prosthetic limbs, and artificial organs. I happen to have a specific fascination with the physiology of the muscles and nerves and how they all work together. Which brings me to my lab.

So what are all these things attached to my arm?
They are surface electromyogram (EMG) electrodes. EMG is the electrical signal produced by muscles when they move.. it’s like how an EKG measures the activity in the heart. My lab studies arm movements. That’s the simple description. There are a lot of different aspects to this – like looking at how muscles coordinate to make movement, so that we can try to reproduce it for people who have motor disabilities such as stroke or spinal cord injury. And looking at how reflex activity works in the arm if you encounter a perturbation (like if someone bumps you while you’re carrying a tray with drinks on it), and how that reflex activity is disrupted from different disease. We also study different types of reflexes, including startle – those experiments use a loud speaker behind your head to make you actually jump. Another cool one is the flexion-withdrawal reflex. That’s the reflex that results if you touch something painful like a hot stove. And yes, to study this, we actually use electrical stimulation to elicit the painful response. Sounds like mad science, but it’s not so bad – I was a subject for that experiment a couple times, and it’s actually one of the easier experiments that I’ve had to do, believe it or not.

So why should anyone care about these things? Well, your arms are extremely useful for most functional tasks you perform – eating, typing, showering, getting dressed, scratching your nose. Any sort of fine manipulation is done with your arms and hands. Your arms have the ability to reach through quite a large workspace, like reaching up to a high shelf to get something. There is so much flexibility in your arms’ functions, that they are super useful to us. This means that if something goes wrong with your ability to control your arms, you will lose a lot of function. It also means that it’s really complicated to understand how they work, in order to fix the things that go wrong.

That’s a basic idea of why we care about the stuff in my lab. Technically I should say labs, since I work for two labs – but both of them specialize in upper limb research. I happen to think it’s pretty cool :) It’s definitely not for everyone, but I really like being a part of science, and I even have learned to like the nerdy technical parts of being an engineer, like writing computer code and soldering wires and troubleshooting equipment when it breaks in the middle of an experiment. Work is interesting, and it pays the bills :)

Hopefully this was not too scary in terms of being overly sciencey, and maybe even sheds some insight into what is involved with being a biomedical engineer!