Thursday, July 8th

Today at work Gihan and I spent the entire day setting up our rig for our experiment. I went from not knowing what a nut, bolt, or washer was...to being a pro at using Alan keys and assembling aluminum posts together! The rig looks like parallel bars that would be used to lower oneself down from 0 weight to full weight on a glass plate. We are putting high speed cameras and lighting under the glass plate t capture the image of the bottom of the foot as a person stands on it in order to compute minor strain in the bottom of the foot. This has never been done before, and has many applications!! Hooray! However, the system we are using to compute the strain is quite a pain to use, but hopefully it will cooperate.

Also, thinking about what I want to do later after I finish school. One of the guys here is working on a needle-less drug delivery system. Although what he is doing is not related to sport, it is very interesting nonetheless, and makes me think...I might not want to do purely sports stuff for my career..even though it is very fun! I really like the medical side (thus why I am biomedical engineering) of sport, and in addition to designing things for sport, I also want to design things for medical applications...so maybe something along the lines of rehabilitation engineering-- designing medical devices (running prostheses etc.) to allow people to become more physically active! The head of the sports tech has a background in human biology, so I am going to speak with him about how to best pursue this field. But, talking to Alex about his project and how he went from mechE/sports to medical engineering helped make me think of the bigger picture..which is what I want to ultimately do...spread my knowledge about science and help people live a more active lifestyle that normally wouldnt be able to! Maybe through that I can branch onto TV and take over Samantha Brown's job on the Travel Channel??? YES!

Tonight we went to an Applebee's type restaurant called WeatherSpoon's to celebrate the first year PhD's getting through their 1st year "inquisition" (intense!). It was curry and a drink for 4.99 pounds (good deal!). Ended up being a great night and great conversation and really really fun!