The Brain-Machine Interface Research Project Projects Abroad, based in Sussex, England, is an organization that pairs volunteers of all ages with projects all over the world. In 2011, it created the Human Rights Office in South Africa as an accredited legal clinic to represent impoverished clients in court and assist them with various legal matters. “While there, I was essentially treated as a lawyer. I had my own caseload, I had my own clients and I was responsible for doing the research and the legwork,” Clark said. “I had an attorney supervise me, but I was pretty much allowed to go on my own.” It was an invaluable experience for Clark – one that gave her a view of the law, and the world, that she had never seen.
On Nov. 14, 2015, Luanna Maria Silva de Siqueira won first prize in the Undergraduate Student Poster Competition at the IEEE Central Indiana Section Metro Area Workshop Conference in Indianapolis. The name of her presentation was “Real-Time Control of an Automobile Robot using Noninvasive Motor Imagery EEG Signals from Human Motor Cortex Region.”
Silva de Siqueira’s winning presentation was the result of her work on a brainmachine interface research project in Tech’s Human-Machine Interface laboratory, directed by Dr. Jaydip Desai. “Her project entailed acquiring brain signals associated with human hand movements, designing an algorithm to identify repetitive and correlated events on EEG signals from the human motor cortex region of the brain and implementing an algorithm to control a real-time automobile robot using human hand imagination,” said Desai, assistant professor of biomedical engineering.
“I absolutely did help some of the people I worked with,” she said. “There are so many people and it can feel overwhelming because you can’t help everybody, but you do what you can because it really does make a difference. When I first received my cases, they were just letters written on manila folders. It wasn’t until I met my clients at the clinics that they became real to me. It is the human connection with this profession that I have never felt before and look forward to reliving once I start my own journey after law school.”
According to Desai, brain-machine interface technology plays an important role in motor rehabilitation, using the region of the cerebral cortex involved in planning, controlling and executing voluntary movements. This technology will help paralyzed patients replace or restore useful physiological functions by using electrical impulses from the human brain.
Dr. Jaydip Desai and Luanna Maria Silva de Siqueira
The education Robyn Clark received from Indiana Tech Law School helped her change lives as an intern at a legal clinic in South Africa last year.
The annual conference provides participants with unique learning experiences with topics on the cuttingedge of technical innovation today. Each workshop is a springboard to a deeper understanding of technology and its myriad of applications and potential for innovation. The conferences are geared toward practicing engineers, students and retired engineers, and provide an excellent opportunity for networking, knowledge-sharing and professional development.
“I am proud of her,” Desai said. “She used to spend 14 to 18 hours every week to gain research knowledge in the brain-computer interface field, and within three months, she completed her project and presented her research project poster.”
Indiana Tech Magazine
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