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...