Juggling 2 biomedical projects definitely ain't a joke.

I'm full to the brim with biomedical projects. This year 2015 is supposed to be a breakthrough, but I've gotta work extra hard this time round.

For starters, I began a UROP under Prof Raye on Muscle-activated Robotics, which involves using electromyography (EMG) signals. Pretty tough, considering that there's quite a lot about the raw data that I don't know nuts about. Not only that, there's still a bunch of electronics that I have no idea how to get it working to produce a clean and filtered output that's clear enough to differentiate between different hand movements as of yet.

On top of that, there is yet another hemodynamics-related design project on Percutaneous Mitral Valve Replacement. That's quite a mouthful. Basically it's designing a heart valve that's small enough to be fed through the major blood vessels and deployed at your heart to keep your body pumping blood without major problems - all while making sure that the method to do so will leave as little wounds as possible. In short, a minimally invasive method.

Operations Management - It's an interesting module, until you realise that you can't really make out what numbers are being used in calculating the throughput rate, and the idea of inventories becomes very blurry, and vastly different from the definition you are used to (inventories in MMORPGs vs inventories in terms of Operations Management...)

Aaaaaand suddenly my experience during my previous internship doesn't seem to be all that useful for this semester's projects. For one, how the hell are you going to use 3D Printing to produce a stent frame prototype to hold a tissue valve - and make it mechanically stable enough to withstand shear and pressure forces in a porcine heart specimen? No nitinol - takes too long to fabricate, and no plastic because it wouldn't accurately model an actual stent frame in terms of mechanical strength and biocompatibility...

And oh, the most epic quote of all day I heard from my professor during Biomaterials lecture earlier this afternoon:

"I didn't have a lot to play with, so I played with mercury - a lot."

Internship: good or bad?

Internship: good or bad? You decide for yourself. All I know is that I'm doing a hell lot of stuff I never found I am inclined to do, such as learning how to work PHP, create a LAMP server framework, work with 3D printing technologies and optimise the PCs needed to run Instron material mechanical testing machines.

Basically I found that I love tackling with problems no one else would normally be interested in - at the cost of learning the skills what most people would be eyeing on to snag a good paying job with.

What to do? I'm just an engineer who doesn't know how to apply what I have to carve out a living for myself. All that has to change, one of these days.

Internship - and a much needed break

Things have been going pretty much smoothly for now, apart from a few hiccups, is what I'd like to say to others. Unfortunately life isn't always that simple.

Call it taking up too many commitments, if you will. Martial Arts Day NUS (MADNUS) 2015 isn't as smooth sailing as last year's, that's for sure. Add this onto instructional video series for my internship work and you have hell of a whack job coming your way if you don't do this juggling right.

Lately I've been working till 3-4am for my work and having to turn up on Saturday and Sunday as well. I needed the break, so there. I went to get 2 days of MC. Hopefully I'll get back more motivation to carry on after my much needed break when I report back to work tomorrow.

An entire year of Biomedical Engineering training progress - and reviving my blog!

An entire year has passed. Next thing I know, I'm already 23 years old and still have no idea what I'm gonna do in the next 5 years. But at least I'm still in university and figuring out things along the way. 2 more years and that's it. The thought is scary.

At the very least I've crossed a few important personal milestones:

1) BN2202 - Introduction to Biotransport
Toughest time of my life, but best project work team I've got. Project topic had us stuck for a couple of weeks trying to brainstorm for something related to biofluid mechanics. In the end, we chose to be adventurous to play around with investigating otitis media - middle ear infection. It involved how to introduce pressure waves via low-frequency sound waves (we were trying out infrasound) into the middle ear cavity to induce flow where fluid is trapped in the middle ear. It could have gone either terribly or spectacular - but I'm so glad that we actually made it as one of Dr Kim Sangho's best project group for that semester through even though the results were rather ambiguous.

I nicknamed my group Team Symphonius, who is still inside the NUS BME Microhemodynamics Laboratory today. Who knows what's gonna happen for the next few years, but it was a pretty good start point to begin peering into the world of biomedical microhemodynamics - blood related research. It was also then that I felt that I wasn't doing enough justice to my previous effort to get myself into NUS Biomedical Engineering - and it was high time I've bucked up before I get my ass kicked really bad by my unfavourable academic circumstances.

2) BN2101 - Principles of Bioengineering <not available anymore>
It was the last semester that NUS Biomedical Engineering was offering this overview module after 12 consecutive years running, and it was pretty sad because it was such an EASY module! Project work takes up 20%, which was by far the best one I ever did because of a few reasons:

• I was able to steer the group into a concrete, futuristic idea that seemed more plausible given today's biomedical technology: My project was to propose a paper project about a device that can treat abdominal aortic aneurysms with a highly angulated neck anatomy or a short proximal neck. In a nutshell: if the neck angle is too steep, you cannot place conventional stents down there to fix the aneurysms at that region.
• Out of 6 project members, I had 4 other teammates who were willing to push through our own limits together as a team, and had that commitment. That spurred me to keep on going even though we had that single defunct, non-existent member inside (he never attended most of the group meetings at all, and contributed very little).
• I knew all these members beforehand, across the entire first year! Best team ever - the way they did their stuff was lightning fast - and I honestly felt I was really lagging behind in terms of the hard work they have put in during their first year as I was still struggling with the basics.
• What else to talk about other than an A grade!

3) BN2203 - Introduction to Bioengineering Design
It's pure luck getting the dream team for biomedical design projects, so of course getting another group that's just as effective is fat hope. Still, I can say that among the projects given to us, this was a colossal amount of work being shitted out at us.

The only biggest problem we had wasn't the funding - out of $500 we actually spent a rough $250+ which was very cost effective, but the comments of our supervising professor always wavers - you could ask him about the stuff today, he gives a comment and you could get another completely different suggestion the next day. Needless to say, we were running around like headless chickens (due to my mistakes as the group leader) as I was also not having any concrete idea what the hell we were doing for a pulse oximeter design. There was simply too much content to digest and use, and I was desperate to push my CAP back to my personal goal of 3.5 minimum. Thankfully I did just that, whew.

We had Arduino, we had LabVIEW, but how do you marry these two working systems together? LabVIEW Interface For Arduino (LIFA), that's what. There was LINX, but we figured it was much more stable to use an earlier software version, although that came with its own problems. All in all, after much work we managed to come up with a pulse oximeter whose working mechanism was getting it to work on LabVIEW without the use of a National Instruments Data Acquision (DAQ) device. That saved our troubles by a lot. However, time was really tight, and due to my lack of programming skill my Arduino code had to be scrapped completely because I didn't know how to manipulate the code libraries to do signal processing on Arduino code... Shit.

Project results weren't that bad after all (I got a B+) - even though I was already expecting to be getting a C- or D+ by the time the project was over. It definitely felt this bad - and never have I ever panicked this much for a project ever before. Still, it was way better than what I expected, and so I shouldn't be complaining!

Much of this is talking about my biomedical engineering progress in NUS, but really. These are the highlights of my 2nd year - and I think I'm pretty proud of the personal achievements within these design projects even though my grades were considered pretty dismal. More could have been done, but I shall save the tales for another time...