New bioengineering faculty member wants to understand what moves us

tdonnel — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 13:37:05 +0000

New bioengineering faculty member wants to understand what moves us tdonnel Tue, 10/22/2024 - 09:37

In This Story

The Department of Bioengineering welcomed new Assistant Professor Khadija Zaidi this fall. Her background is in examining the effects of neural injuries on body movement, inspired by her longtime interest in the movements of the universe.

Zaidi recalled a quote that inspired her as a young person: if you want to understand the world, study either anatomy or astronomy. Both fields study movements of the universe, on a micro- and macro-level scale, respectively.

“It's kind of amazing that things don't go wrong more often based on the amount of movement that happens,” Zaidi said. “There are all these movements and delicate balances, and wanting to study more of that led me to the intersection between biology, or the natural world, and mathematics. That's what brought me to bioengineering.”

Khadija Zaidi

Zaidi studied as an undergraduate at the University of Maryland and earned her doctorate from George Mason last year. As a graduate student, Zaidi studied human movement, drawn to the idea that movement is one of the greatest differentiators between living and non-living.

“I was very interested in looking at how the brain initiates movement, so my graduate studies focused specifically on how movement changes after stroke or through age," she said. At George Mason, Zaidi’s work in Associate Professor Qi Wei’s biomechanics lab focused on upper extremity movement impairments consequent to neural injuries such as Stroke, and age-related differences in bilateral coordination.

While Zaidi originally planned to apply her bioengineering degree to a career in health care, she found herself drawn to the work of her professors. “I really fell more in love with the vast amount of knowledge that the professors had, more so than the hands-on medical procedures,” she said. Now, many of the bioengineering students she teaches aspire to careers in healthcare themselves

This semester, Zaidi is teaching two courses, a bioengineering signals and systems course and a computational modeling and bioengineering course. So far, she has enjoyed the work.

“I've been really enjoying showing students how to represent real-world problems and be able to use different engineering tools to solve them,” she said. “It's been nice to give them engineering tools and have them use their biology knowledge and put it together and have everything click together.”

In the future, Zaidi hopes to introduce a biomedical ethics course to the department.

“As soon as I graduated, I was asked a lot of questions, such as, ‘What is your opinion on stem cells? Your opinion on end-of-life decisions? On any kind of biological enhancement or modification? On GMOs?,” she explained. “These are very popular topics to debate. They are polarizing, and as bioengineers we have a little bit of insight into the processes behind them but may not necessarily have delved into the ethics.

She sees the value, she said, “for students to get the opportunity to discuss that with faculty before they're in the real world being asked, ‘Oh, you're a bioengineer. What do you think about this?’”

Topics

Department of Bioengineering

Bioengineering

neurological injury

Empowering people with assistive technology

Tama Moni — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 18:57:24 +0000

Empowering people with assistive technology Tama Moni Mon, 11/28/2022 - 13:57

In This Story

Quentin Sanders

Healthy individuals can often take simple movements for granted, but after a neurological event such as a stroke or traumatic brain injury, simple motions like grasping an object or flexing an ankle can become quite difficult and even frustrating.

George Mason University Assistant Professor Quentin Sanders and his team of researchers at the ImPoWer Lab in the College of Engineering and Computing are finding ways to make these activities easier by inventing and improving rehabilitative and assistive technologies.

Quentin Sanders, assistant professor in bioengineering and mechanical engineering
Photo by Ron Aira / Creative Services / George Mason University

The lab’s research team seeks to develop innovative and globally relevant rehabilitation, robotic, and prosthetic devices to enhance the quality of life of individuals who have experienced a neurological injury or amputation. But more than that, Sanders hopes to empower researchers and students to see themselves as scientists and scholars.

Two new members of the team have promising ideas. The first is post-doctoral researcher Nelson Glover who earned his PhD from The Ohio State University in 2022. Glover is funded by the eFellows Post-doctoral Fellowship, sponsored by the American Society for Engineering Education and the National Science Foundation. He seeks to develop wearable, portable, and economical solutions for gait retraining for people who have experienced neurological injuries.

According to Sanders, most current solutions require bulky and expensive equipment, but Glover has a different idea. Glover’s device uses small, inexpensive sensors to measure the muscle movements and forces of the ankle.

He says, “This type of training is called biofeedback. Usually, you're giving a person feedback based on some type of biological signal that you're measuring to induce some type of behavioral change. In our approach, we are providing people feedback based on forces that we're measuring with these sensors and seeing if they can alter ankle propulsion forces.”

Sanders’ second new team member is PhD student, Mohammad Shams who is developing a standardized framework for evaluating rehabilitative devices outside the clinical setting.

The study begins with a very, very large data set from a thousand users who use a device that Sanders’ previous PhD advisor created. The device, a wearable sensor, is one that people use for hand therapy.

Sanders says, “What's nice about this large data set is that we can start to get a sense of how they're adapting different parameters when they're in the wild when they're not in the clinic when the therapist isn't there. We can find out why they aren’t using this device, or what they like about the device.”

Sanders compares it to the kind of user reports that makers of smartphones use all the time. Companies use them to improve features and functions and make them more appealing to consumers. He says, “We don't have that for a lot of devices. So, a lot of times you'll try a device on in this very controlled setting but it often isn’t very realistic.”

The research aims to leverage Artificial Intelligence and machine learning to develop algorithms in this project as well. For example, if you see, someone trending towards abandoning the use of the technology, the researchers could program an algorithm that sends a reminder and tells the user to try something different.

“I really like this project a lot, it's answering a lot of fundamental questions about rehabilitation device usage that we don't really have the answers to yet,” says Sanders.

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