Instrumentation and Control for Biological, Biomedical, and Education Applications

Creative Inquiry Projects

This “Creative Inquiry Team” challenges electrical engineering students to work with students and faculty from areas in biology, education, psychology, and bioengineering to solve instrumentation and control problems from these areas. The team works to define a problem of interest to the "customer", a member of the team with an interesting biology or biomedical instrumentation or control problem, and then generate and demonstrate possible solutions. In one ongoing project titled "Haptic Virtual Manipulatives" students work with math and science educators to create computer interface devices that provide the user with a sense of touch interaction with a computer program. The main goal is to capture the benefit that students get from manipulating physical manipulatives to learn abstract topics, such as algebra tiles, in a computer interface. Students from education and psychology are needed to help developed and evaluate the haptic virtual manipulatives. A second ongoing project involves the development of a computer interface for training surgeons to use laparoscopic, minimally invasive, surgery tools. The team is working to identify the sense of touch developed by expert surgeons and transfer this skill through a computer based training system. A previous project, "Mirrored Micro-environment", sought a means of studying the impact of factors such as ocean warming and pollution on the genetic structure of marine wildlife. The general concept is that sensor data is collected from a target site and then used to re-create these same environmental conditions in a laboratory aquarium. Conditions of the aquarium will match the conditions of the remote site; that is, the aquarium environment mirrors that of the remote site. A diverse group of interests, skills, and majors are sought for all of these projects. Please email Timothy Burg (tburg@clemson.edu).