My fascination to bioengineering started with a bitter experience after my undergraduate degree. I had secured a job in a MNC and was awaiting my joining date, being a enthusiastic basketball player I started playing basketball in my free time. During such a day I twisted my knee and tore the ligaments of my knee which made bed ridden for the next two months. I was captivated by the work done by my orthopedician and my therapist. But to add to it, I was equally frustrated by the deficiency in assistive devices that were there to help me. Though I was consulting one of the premier hospitals in India, I could not get the braces and traction systems that I was in need of. The reasons were that it was the good braces were all pretty penny. I felt
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For my thesis work I had a unique opportunity to collaborate and work with clinicians where we had hugely informative meetings where we shared our ideas to bring about an optimal solution. I was really tough for me initially but as the project went through in three months I had a good idea of the clinical needs and had my ideas clearly sorted out.I started working on my thesis titled “Evaluating the feasibility of vestibular rehabilitation using google cardboard based virtual environments”. The objective of the project was to build a low-cost portable system that could do an individualized assessment of rehabilitation and the vestibular system. The system VeGas(Vestibular Rehabilitation Gaming System) was a game based system developed over Unity game engine compatible with most of the mobile and VR platforms which mimicked the conventional rehabilitation exercises. With the approval from the IRB we carried out the feasibility experiments on 15 healthy subjects and 15 patients with unilateral vestibular dysfunctions. The same project had an analysis done on the IMU data collected from the phone during the gameplay to quantify the head movement kinematics and to compare the quality of head movements among patients and healthy subjects. This project helped me learn different interdisciplinary skills from coding to understanding the clinical needs and patient management during trials. It was really satisfying to see a real clinical need be transformed to a product. Even more satisfying was the fact that the project won the best poster award in the institutional research
For my thesis work I had a unique opportunity to collaborate and work with clinicians where we had hugely informative meetings where we shared our ideas to bring about an optimal solution. I was really tough for me initially but as the project went through in three months I had a good idea of the clinical needs and had my ideas clearly sorted out.I started working on my thesis titled “Evaluating the feasibility of vestibular rehabilitation using google cardboard based virtual environments”. The objective of the project was to build a low-cost portable system that could do an individualized assessment of rehabilitation and the vestibular system. The system VeGas(Vestibular Rehabilitation Gaming System) was a game based system developed over Unity game engine compatible with most of the mobile and VR platforms which mimicked the conventional rehabilitation exercises. With the approval from the IRB we carried out the feasibility experiments on 15 healthy subjects and 15 patients with unilateral vestibular dysfunctions. The same project had an analysis done on the IMU data collected from the phone during the gameplay to quantify the head movement kinematics and to compare the quality of head movements among patients and healthy subjects. This project helped me learn different interdisciplinary skills from coding to understanding the clinical needs and patient management during trials. It was really satisfying to see a real clinical need be transformed to a product. Even more satisfying was the fact that the project won the best poster award in the institutional research