Coming to USC Viterbi, I was super excited to join the Trojan family, enjoy the beautiful Los Angeles weather, and benefit from the top tier biomedical engineering coursework. But as a BME student, I was also very interested in finding as many hands-on experiences as I possibly could. Fortunately, USC Viterbi has a plethora of hands-on opportunities!
In my first year here I have been able to get involved in a variety of more hands-on experiences within Viterbi and the BME program, and they have been some of the most valuable parts of my time here so far. These experiences are a great way to learn new skills by actually using them, meet a lot of great people, and just get to actually do engineering. Here are a few of the amazing things that I’ve been able to get involved with!
Medesign
Medesign is an application-based Viterbi organization where students are grouped into design teams. Each design team finds and researches a needs area in medicine, and then works to build a medical device to help address this needs area. We conducted a lot of interviews with medical professionals and professors to learn more about the needs area and get advice. My team is currently focusing on Potassium testing for patients post-kidney transplant, and after a lot of research and interviews we are hoping to start to build our device in the BME innovation space!
Medesign general meetings also sometimes include technical workshops, where I’ve gotten to learn how to use 3D modeling programs such as CAD, work a laser engraver, and more! I’ve also had the opportunity to become even more involved in this organization by serving as the new member representative on the eboard, which has been a wonderful way for me to learn more about the club and about BME as a whole.
Associated Students of Biomedical Engineering (ASBME) + Makeathon
ASBME is a wonderful organization that is a great opportunity to meet and hang out with other biomedical engineering students. During these club meetings I’ve been able to dive straight into the engineering part of BME, with technical workshops where we’ve done things such as code a working pulse oximeter using the Arduino platform.
Every year ASBME puts on a Makeathon, where teams are presented with a topic/problem on Friday night and then spend all weekend coming up with, researching, and prototyping a medical device focused on this topic. I loved participating in Makeathon this year, and my team actually ended up taking first place out of eleven teams! This year’s topic was knee injuries, and my team chose to focus on pediatric physical therapy regarding knee injuries. We learned that 91% of kids assigned at home PT exercises do not actually follow through with the exercises, so we came up with a way to gamify pediatric PT to keep kids more engaged: an app that transforms pediatric physical therapy into an interactive game-based app. Our device was a sleeve worn over the knee that uses a gyroscope, flex sensor, and ultrasonic transducer to measure knee motion. This connected to an app that monitors the patient’s knee motion in order to provide data to the physical therapist, while also functioning as a game. As kids do their physical therapy exercises they advance in the game, collecting cute avatars. We created the prototype for this device by using Arduino sensors, a repurposed shirt, and by coding a rudimentary app with a cute avatar gacha feature that could measure your squats and get accessories once the squats were completed! This was an amazing opportunity to gain a ton of coding experience, learn to prototype and practice the design process, and it was the most truly engineering experience I have ever had.
These are just a few of the hands-on BME experiences that I have gotten to be a part of in my first semester and a half here at USC Viterbi! USC has so many hands-on opportunities for students from all majors, and I would encourage everyone to get involved in anything where you can do engineering, since this is the best part of our majors. I am so excited to keep being involved in these organizations and to participate in even more hands-on experiences in the future! Go dive into engineering, and fight on!
