Institution news
Many PhD and recent graduates from all over the country attended the event hosted by IMechE’s Biomedical Engineering Division (BmED). Samuel Vennin, Young Board member, Biomedical Engineering Division and Chair, Healthcare Technologies Student and Early Career Awards, reports on the day’s events.
The Awards offer to students and recent graduates the opportunity to present their work to academic and business leaders in the wide field of bioengineering. Prizes were awarded by a panel of BmED Board members and industrial partners for video and oral presentations.
The novelty this year came from the inclusion of two category in which students presented their research in 3-minute videos. After review from experts and an audience vote, the three videos with the best aggregate scores got to present their video online and answer questions from judges.
The first category of the day, sponsored by The Care Machine, was one of these and celebrated the best bioengineering project video by an undergraduate/MSc student. Hollie Ruda, from King’s College London, was awarded the first prize for a work on a digital phenotyping tool for the remote monitoring of bipolar disorder. Mahshad Rabiee and Shawn Navarednam, both from the University of Southampton, were the runners up.
The second such category was open to PhD and early career researchers who recently passed their viva and was sponsored by the NIHR Surgical MedTech Co-Operative. A video on the development of a robotic affective telemedicine system for mental health and dementia earned Maria Lima from Imperial College London the top prize. Sarah Crossland from the University of Leeds and Huidong Wei from Aston University were runners up.
Vicon sponsored the prize for Best Medical Engineering Undergraduate Project, won by Patricia O’Sullivan, Munster Technological University. Her oral presentation focused on the development of a complex phantom for human centric wireless system testing. Katie Whiffin, University of Surrey, and Eisha Farrukh Hashmi, Queen Mary University London, also presented their work and won prizes.
Finally, the DePuy Prize for Best Medical Engineering PhD Project was awarded to Irene Yang, University of Oxford, for her oral presentation on the use of robotics to address the problem of mobile bearing dislocation in the knee. Elizabeth Shumbayawonda, University of Surrey, and Zisos Mitros, University College London, took the second place.
Overall, judges praised students for the quality of their work, carried out in challenging conditions induced by the current COVID pandemic.