[Music] he [Music] biomechanical engineering is a subset of biomedical engineering biomedical is more like putting an implant in your body and deciding how it's going to react with your blood or your rest of your like bodily systems but biomechanical is well how are we going to design that implant so it can stand up to you know Everyday Use it's any way that a mechanical principle so you can kind of think of physics there would be applied to the human body anything you're doing to to make the human being better biomechanical engineering uh sort of separate
into three Fields clinical occupational and sports for clinical you can better understand diseases such as Ms or Autism For Occupational you can design a safer and more long-term healthy workplace and for sports you know you can design a better push off block for an athlete you can help reduce the number of concussions that football players going to get by designing a better helmet I thought engineering was only about designing cars and building robots it's not biomechanical engineering is a really up and growing field because there's more um need especially in the clinical field physical therapists
have been around for a very long time and now they're starting to realize that working in conjunction with an engineer can really help bring more objective measures to their practice some neat jobs some of my recent students have gotten include working at prosthetic uh design a company that designs artificial limbs you could also do things like become a lab director lab coordinator at a Motion Lab so putting the markers on people um that could be for sports reasons research reasons even a movie studio I have a student who designed baby uh equipment and and gear
and so when I had my baby and was looking at product she said I design that and it's in the stores so different things like that are always available I don't speak well but this is a good idea blinda Isaac our rehab manager um had the idea to contact the Innovation Center and UD and the biomechanical engineer students for this project to see if they can make devices that we can use with our patients um with the iPad I love it yeah that's the whole point yeah it's why we worked with those guys at UD
to do that yeah in high school I I knew I kind of wanted to be an engineer because I was interested in making things and I thought that was really cool I didn't ever know I wanted to be an engineer at all to start with um I really wanted to be a teacher for um special education uh and working with children with disabilities that was really something that I wanted to do and I didn't know at the time that Engineers can do things like that it was an opportunity to do something for the human being
to do kind of those cool science fiction things that you see in the movie and make them a reality finding ways to have people interfac with machines and computers I mean it sounds science fiction but that's becoming more of a reality to me for an engineer to be able to help children with disabilities to work with doctors to work with physical therapists I was just sold at that point in time I wanted to be someone that would design prosthetic Limbs and evaluate how a child with cerebal Psy walks and all of those things that I
have gotten to do that was my motivation for becoming an engineer [Music] so anytime you talk about engineering you're talking about stem engineering is the e in stem there's a little bit of biology and Anatomy there's a lot of math uh there's some Physics involved things you learn in books which aren't always as exciting but taking it to something that's real if you're interested in becoming an engineer in general but specifically biomechanical engineering kind of starts in high school and that's when you want to take as many science and math classes as you can I
think my last one was AP Calculus I took AP Physics I took chemistry trigonometry where you're talking about signs and cosiness I use that all of the time when we're trying to find out the angle that someone's leaning or the angle that a knee is at while walking biology is is definitely a root of biomechanical engineering and so you want to take that Anatomy physiology if those are offered as an engineer you will write a lot and so you want to practice that learn teamwork skills at least as an engineer undergrad you do a lot
of working together on teams you do a lot of homework together you'll find that most institutions that have a mechanical engineering department will have biomechanics to some degree when I was looking for schools I just emailed the department and said I know I'm interested in biome mechanics do you offer that within your program and if not is there another program in your school that does so if I want to go Masters I'll be on a two two and a half year plan I'd probably go into industry then if I do PhD it'll be a 4-year
process I'm already a year in after then I could either again work companies or I could actually go into [Music] academics I absolutely love biomechanical engineering and it's because I get to deal with people I can work with physical therapists and doctors and Physicians and people in the clinical side but then the patients come in and that's why I I took this career path the ability to innovate is becoming so important to be unique in what we design and uh um help satisfy needs of different people and all of that comes from engineering [Music]
