UPEI lab blending engineering with biomedicine to improve health care - Action News
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PEI

UPEI lab blending engineering with biomedicine to improve health care

The laboratory of mechatronics applied to biomedicine at UPEI is working with the Atlantic Veterinary College in a new branch of engineering called veterinary medicine designed to improve health-care for animals.

'I work with the futureevery day. We make the future'

Nicholas Wilkie, research associate and engineer with UPEI, sees a virtual dog leg appear on the desk he is sitting at through the Microsoft HoloLens headset. (Jane Robertson/CBC)

Research associateNicholas Wilkiewaves his arms through the air.

By using an augmented reality headset,a computer-generated dog's leg twists and moves under his motioning hands in virtual space before him.

It's just one of the projects taking place at the laboratory of mechatronicsapplied to biomedicine at UPEI'sfaculty of sustainable design engineering.

Assistant Prof. Nadja Bressanstarted the lab in 2018 and has been running it since. She saidmechatronicsis the fusion of five types of engineering: mechanics, electronics, informatics, control and systems.

Nadja Bressan, assistant professor at UPEI, shows just a few of the projects that the lab is working on. (Jane Robertson/CBC)

Bressan is using that fusion to look athealth-care solutions for people and animals. She has partnered with a co-investigator from the Atlantic Veterinary College (AVC) in Charlottetown to work on projects like the twisting dog's leg.

"It's actually an emerging field called veterinary engineering," said Dr. Cate Creighton, a veterinary anesthesiologist with AVC.

"It combines ...veterinary medicine and electromechanical engineering because they complement each other really well in developing and testing and using this technology."

Dr. Cate Creighton, with Atlantic Veterinary College, demonstrates how to use the Microsoft HoloLens as Bressan looks on. (Jane Robertson/CBC)

Using a Microsoft HoloLens, the team is working on less invasive practices by using the the mixed-reality headset.

"It probably looks like a large pair of glasses," Wilkie said.

"It uses cameras and some little miniaturized projectors that project images into your eyes so that you can look around the physical world around us and see holograms placed against walls and other surfaces in the area."

Wilkie says in the augmented reality space you can interact with the virtual objects while still seeing the world around you. (Jane Robertson/CBC)

The work they are doing will allow those in a veterinary clinic to look at a virtual representation of a dog's leg during a procedure.

Less invasive

"Part of veterinary anesthesia is monitoring animals during anesthesia and performing nerve blocks during anesthesia, both to aid the monitoring," Creighton said. "And nerve blocks we do before painful procedures so the animals experience less pain during the procedure as well as after.

"The goal of what we are doing is to improve upon existing technologies, whether it's giving us more information or information in a different way."

Creighton says the less invasive methods they are researching will improve recovery time of the animal patients. (Jane Robertson/CBC)

It can also be less invasive to look at the animal virtually sometimesbefore a procedure even begins as the non-invasive methods produce better outcomes for the patients.

"Whenever you use a tool or an instrument that has augmented reality you are actually seeing the virtual on top of the real," Bressan said.

"That is why it makes [it]so fascinating because you can see both interacting at the same time in one frame."

Technology advancing fast

Wilkie has been working on the coding for the project and said he didn't realize when he first started school how quickly things would advance.

"I didn't realize we'd be able to have something so small and so mobile that we could just carry around on our heads, like in sci-fi movies, that we could apply directly to industry and the medical applications," Wilkie said.

"It's incredible."

Bressan holds up the HoloLens that they are using in their work with the Atlantic Veterinary College. (Jane Robertson/CBC)

It is just one of the projects the two co-investigators are exploring as part ofveterinary-medicine engineering. They are also working on different heart monitors for various animals from horses to bats and snakes.

Bressan said it's exciting to see how connecting the engineering fields with health care can be adapted to improve things.

"I feel that I can play with the future," Bressan said.

"So everybody dreams about the future every day. They dream about it. I work with the futureevery day. We make the future."

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