Hi, my name is Ryann Fife and I attend Montrose High School. For the past week, I have been in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania interning at the Rehab Neural Engineering Lab. When I arrived, my mentor, Doug Weber assigned me to work with an undergrad student named Lily Buchanan. Lily attends college in New York but is working in the lab for the summer. We had two projects that we worked on. The first of which involved setting up a number of cameras around the lab. The cameras will be used to watch and analyze an average gait versus that of an amputee or a stroke victim by creating 3D models on a program called OpenSim. Setting up cameras may sound easy, but it involved a lot of trial and error. We had to make sure that if we placed markers on any spot on the walkway it could be seen by at least three cameras. It was mostly a game of moving a camera two centimeters, reconfiguring the location on the computer by waving a wand with markers on it, and then looking at what every camera could see. We worked on the cameras for the first two days, and then we switched to our second project.
This is what the wand configuration looked like on the computer.
This project tied in with the previous project. The goal is to attach sleeves around the legs of the patients to help the OpenSim model be more accurate. The sleeves have sensors on them that connect to a program called SpikeGadgets. Together, the sleeve and SpikeGadgets sensor should recognize and record the nerves being fired when the patient walks. Unfortunately, the signals when we connected the headstage to the sleeve weren’t intelligible. We spent the next three days trying different methods to see where the issue lied. We hooked up a function generator to send a signal through a simple voltage divider that we made to hopefully see a clear pattern on the screen. We finally pinpointed the issue to the main headstage, so we compiled photos and examples in a paper to send to the company.
The signal when we used the faulty headstage.
The signal when we used the test board.
Over the weekend I was able to tour the University of Pittsburgh campus, as well as go to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. My time in Pittsburgh so far has been great. My host family has been very friendly and I’ve enjoyed getting to know them. This is a fantastic experience and I’m very excited to learn more from my internship these next two weeks.
Sounds like fascinating work!