Flinders University PhD candidate Lauren Wearne loves the personal side of bone biomechanics, a field of engineering that can directly and completely transform lives.
What enticed you to study engineering?
I was always stronger in the maths and science topics at school, however I wasn’t sure what I wanted to study afterwards. Through an online career quiz, biomedical engineering popped up. I was immediately drawn to how personal it is; working on problems that affect people daily. It is an inspiring field to be a part of and I love the creative side of it.
What would you consider your greatest success in using your skills to solve an engineering problem?
For my honours project, I was fortunate enough to work with a para-cyclist who had multiple sclerosis (MS). Due to their MS, they were unable to feel their hands as they fatigued and had a fear of falling that affected their performance.
During this project, I developed a protocol to test how their sensory ability altered with fatigue, if this affected their ability to grasp their handlebars through EMG analysis (so monitoring how the muscles were contracting) and based on these results, design a handlebar adaption. This was an extremely rewarding project and I am so grateful to the athlete and my supervisors!
Can you share an example of when you needed to be particularly creative and what was the outcome?
With my honours project (above) the EMG data wasn’t as straight forward as I expected! I had to get creative in analysing the data to see what was actually happening. This involved video analysis, coding and then statistics.
What was rewarding to see, was that the athlete’s ability to hold on was not actually affected by fatigue in the same way that their sensory ability was. Even as they lost feeling in their hands, they still retained the same muscle activation, meaning that they didn’t have an increased risk of falling. Moving forward, it was then a case of targeting the sensory abilities that they did retain so they could still feel grip.
How do you attack a big challenge, or what do you do when the answer or way forward is not clear?
I think there are a couple of key things to do when this happens. Firstly, clearly defining where I want to go or what I need to achieve and then, importantly, breaking it down into small steps. This helps me realise the tasks that I can do myself, where I need help – what is within my control and what is outside of it. Often then it is just a matter of getting started on that first step!
If that all fails, I do find that stepping away from it for a bit is also really good. This allows my mind to keep mulling over it in the background and I often find a more creative solution that way.
What words of wisdom would you share with your high school self?
I would tell myself to only stress the big things!
In school there can be a lot of pressure to know exactly what you want to do, but there are so many jobs, experiences and opportunities out there – with heaps of new ones forming everyday! So enjoy school and just see what’s out there.