Close
Blog: Shreyas Dhake's experience of the IHE summer studentship
11 October 2024
The IHE summer studentship gave me the opportunity to work at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital (RNOH) in the LSCIC (London Spinal Cord Injury Centre) and UCL Aspire CREATe lab, which provided a blend of medical and engineering experience.
Initially I started at the CREATe lab where I got to work with two revolutionary innovations one of which had won an award from IET (The Institution of Engineering and Technology) for Innovation and Emergence in 2023 (pictured below). The other PhD project provided vibrations and motor function rehabilitation for spinal cord patients experiencing spasticity and found an improvement in patients via a novel approach. Getting to experience and learn about two novel engineering approaches to enhance rehabilitation was enlightening.
My project's aim was to create a low-cost version of VibroFocus system alongside start to transition its components such that we can integrate other systems such as the UCLtouchrehab and virtual reality (VR). My work involved understanding the electronic and mechanical aspects of the VibroFocus system to integrate with Raspberry Pi and a hat that allows us to take in the input and outputs from the system. Using the Linux command lines and programming we can successfully set up an approach that allows us to transition from myRio to Raspberry pi. Alongside this, the VibroFocus allows users to play a game of ping-pong, to improve this I created the game in Unreal Engine 5 alongside adding capabilities that allows us to change the difficulty of the game in case the user is struggle or finding the task too easy. Additionally, I explored how we can try different virtual interfaces for the user to interact with and how else we can improve either systems. As a bonus working upon my project I get to meet different masters/PhD students and learn about their projects.
The remaining weeks at the end I shadowed Dr Manish Desai at the LSCIC where I got to join in on ward rounds where I met different patients. This allowed me to directly hear their concerns and how clinicians help to resolve/rehabilitate them. I got to meet Dr Desai’s multitude of different colleagues alongside the rehabilitation equipment that some of them used. Also, I got time to talk with a patient one-to-one to hear about his injury, how it affected him and his family along with changes that he would like to see and experience.
This experience was insightful as it helped me see the patients who shall benefit directly from the clinical research that these IHE projects have.
Shreyas' studentship was generously supported by the RNOH charity.