Spine Research
I may or may not have found a project to work on for my masters thesis. I say "may" because I feel like I've already been adopted by Dr. Diaz as part of the team and will be meeting with him for the third time to talk about it this Friday. I say "may not" because, well, I haven't committed yet and I'm not really sure this is the project for me.
I'll try to explain it here. This is as much for my benefit as anyone else's. Maybe by writing it out, I will somehow understand it better.
So, basically, this project focuses on the human in vivo spine. There are three professors who are collaborating on this. So far, they've been meeting on a weekly basis, usually for lunch, and discussing it. I went along on their lunch meeting last week. Most of the time, I was pretty lost and confused.
Professor Choi, one of the three, I believe has already done some work with modeling the spine. He had a grad student working for him who wrote his thesis on the model he developed. Unfortunately, Professor Choi believes it's wrong and doesn't trust this particular student's work.
Eventually, the goal is to use a spinal model (taken from someone else's work--there are plenty of papers out there on this topic) to create seating for people with limited mobility. Perhaps they are spinal cord injured (SCI) or just old and not as flexible anymore. Tammy Bush, the third professor on the team, has done a lot of work designing chairs. She's really focused in the biomechanical field within mechanical engineering. Dr. Diaz is the optimization guru which is why he's a part of this. They want to create an optimized chair to help support people who don't have as much/any muscular control in their lower back.
Some possible applications might be for people who can't reposition themselves and get ulcers if they're in the same spot too long. If a chair could somehow remove the need to reposition then health care workers wouldn't be in such a demand to help shift the people and stuff. And we're not limited to chairs either. Perhaps mattress design could be optimized or even clothing or shoes or anything that affects the shape of the spine.
Right now, they do not have funding for the project. With an ever increasing population of old people and possible health care for everyone, there is potential for something like this to be important. They want me to write a paper about what we have so far in order to build our credibility so that we can get money more easily.
My biggest issue so far is that I fail to see the big picture. I'm not sure what it is exactly we're trying to research, what our goals are, etc. And I also feel I haven't caught the vision. I'm not so sure there's some "magical equation" that can describe anyone's spinal stability by simply changing a few constants. I mean, are we working toward trying to discover something that doesn't actually exist?
Maybe I'll learn a lot, or maybe I'll never really have a clue what's going on and this research will just be painful and pointless.
I'll try to explain it here. This is as much for my benefit as anyone else's. Maybe by writing it out, I will somehow understand it better.
So, basically, this project focuses on the human in vivo spine. There are three professors who are collaborating on this. So far, they've been meeting on a weekly basis, usually for lunch, and discussing it. I went along on their lunch meeting last week. Most of the time, I was pretty lost and confused.
Professor Choi, one of the three, I believe has already done some work with modeling the spine. He had a grad student working for him who wrote his thesis on the model he developed. Unfortunately, Professor Choi believes it's wrong and doesn't trust this particular student's work.
Eventually, the goal is to use a spinal model (taken from someone else's work--there are plenty of papers out there on this topic) to create seating for people with limited mobility. Perhaps they are spinal cord injured (SCI) or just old and not as flexible anymore. Tammy Bush, the third professor on the team, has done a lot of work designing chairs. She's really focused in the biomechanical field within mechanical engineering. Dr. Diaz is the optimization guru which is why he's a part of this. They want to create an optimized chair to help support people who don't have as much/any muscular control in their lower back.
Some possible applications might be for people who can't reposition themselves and get ulcers if they're in the same spot too long. If a chair could somehow remove the need to reposition then health care workers wouldn't be in such a demand to help shift the people and stuff. And we're not limited to chairs either. Perhaps mattress design could be optimized or even clothing or shoes or anything that affects the shape of the spine.
Right now, they do not have funding for the project. With an ever increasing population of old people and possible health care for everyone, there is potential for something like this to be important. They want me to write a paper about what we have so far in order to build our credibility so that we can get money more easily.
My biggest issue so far is that I fail to see the big picture. I'm not sure what it is exactly we're trying to research, what our goals are, etc. And I also feel I haven't caught the vision. I'm not so sure there's some "magical equation" that can describe anyone's spinal stability by simply changing a few constants. I mean, are we working toward trying to discover something that doesn't actually exist?
Maybe I'll learn a lot, or maybe I'll never really have a clue what's going on and this research will just be painful and pointless.
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