Hi Everyone,

It was during the semester two holidays, I noticed some of my friends were writing up amazing articles and blogs, which made me curious. Honestly, I didn't know about what a blog is and platforms such as medium etc. The term ScholarX was introduced to me through those articles and by my colleagues, who told me about this mentoring program. During the period of first ScholarX program, I saw a great improvement in my colleagues, in terms of knowledge about new technologies, industry and academia. This made me curious to apply for ScholarX program. Let me share some of my colleagues’ articles, which you might be interested to read.

ScholarX — 01, I got my one on one mentor.

Life won’t give too many chances to you. Grabbing the one best chance which coincides with you passion is what you deserve. I grabbed ScholarX in my turn and hopefully you’ll get your turn too. I…

Mohamed AfhamMedium

Building Blocks Matter!: #ScholarX

It was 12.05pm, and I was in my Electronics II lecture. Knowing that the time is right for our online gathering, I left the hall with my earphones. Soon, all five of us were in our weekly online meeting. It was our gathering of ScholarX [https://sefglobal.org/scholarx/]mentees... (finding a place …

Ramith HettiarachchiRamith's Blog

I was really excited of being selected for the ScholarX 2020 program and becoming a mentee assigned to Dr. Rukshan Batuwita, who is a Data Scientist at Google and has a PhD in Applied Machine Learning from the University of Oxford, added cream to my joy. My excitation triggered me to contact my mentor without any delay to begin our journey. We had our individual introductory session, where I realized that he is an encyclopedia of Data Science, which made me responsible to value his time and gain maximum knowledge and valuable advises from him. Afterwards we had another session which is an interesting group mentoring session, where I was able to gain a lot through the questions asked by my peers and valuable mentoring given by Dr. Rukshan Batuwita. I hope to share the valuable advices, knowledge we gained from Dr. Rukshan Batuwita and our experience in this journey through a series of articles.

Importance of Statistics in Data Science

One of the key advices given by Dr Rukshan is to have a good foundation in statistics to boost our career in Data Science. Because Data Science includes using samples from a population and make prediction on populations. Statistical concepts like probability distribution, confidence intervals, Bayesian statistics, over and under sampling, and dimensionality reduction plays an important role in Data Science. Additionally, he suggested us to follow mathematics modules related to statistics in the university or online courses and reading good books on it.

Foundation in Machine Learning

A strong foundation is the ladder to ensure the future to adapt and thrive in our career. He advised us to follow good foundation courses in machine learning, which gives more insights about the mathematical concepts used in machine learning such as gradient descent, regression, decision trees, etc. Machine learning course and deep learning specialization provided by Andrew Ng in Coursera are the foundation courses highly suggested by Dr. Rukshan. The links for those courses as follows:

1. Machine Learning, by Andrew Ng, https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning
2. Deep Learning specialization, by Deep learning.ai, https://www.coursera.org/specializations/deep-learning?

Guide to a Path in Academics

In the era of rapid advancement of technologies many undergraduates are confused in whether to follow a path in academics or to join the industry. Also, we are confused with what we should be doing during our undergraduate period. Are we supposed to do more industry related projects to gain more hands-on experience? or polish our fundamentals? This was a question raised by my colleague Amaya, which is crucial for undergraduates.

Dr. Rukshan suggested us to spend more time in polishing our fundamentals during the undergraduate period, if we want to pursue a career in academia. Technologies will rapidly change during the period of our academics (from undergraduates to PhD), but a strong knowledge in fundamentals will help us survive this evolution. He also suggested us to do more reading to get updated about current trends in the technology. When it comes to applying for PhD, he advised us to maintain high GPA and to do good researches during the undergraduate period. These factors will be supportive for us to get a good scholarship to pursue higher studies.

We were able to gain a lot through our group conversation with Dr.Rukshan. I hope that this article would have given you some good insights and hope to share more valuables insights we gain from our mentor in the upcoming articles.

If you have any questions or feedback related to this article, please do list them below!

Hi Everyone,

In this article I want to share the experience of my team (Wanderers) and myself in our first medical related project. From the time I selected biomedical engineering, I was looking forward to do projects in the areas covered under biomedical engineering. In the beginning I lacked knowledge about the technologies and various aspects covered by Biomedical engineering.

To be honest I am now fascinated about the areas covered that comes under biomedical engineering not only medical instrumentation but such as genomic engineering, bioinformatics, medical imaging, digital health, soft robotics, bio signal processing, neural engineering and the list goes on.

COVID 19 pandemic has made everyone understand the need of research and innovations in healthcare to face and overcome these situations. Along with the doctors currently there are many researches and projects going on around the country to support the health staff in the fight against this pandemic. This shows the importance of biomedical engineering and innovations in the healthcare industry. Biomedical engineering is a rising field in the world and is new to our country. As undergraduates it is our responsibility to create innovations and work on projects that solve problems related to healthcare. It is the best way to gain recognition and fame to our department and to our profession.

Firstly, as an engineering undergraduate we should understand that our perspective differs from medical students and doctors. They are more aware of the problems existing in healthcare sector than us. But we have a better view related to solution and its implementation using the technology. So, a good connection with the medical community is utmost important for us to succeed as a Biomedical engineer.

During our semester 3 holidays we had a collaboration with Centre for Biomedical Innovation (CEBI), where my batch of biomedical undergraduates did an Observation study on hospital patient management system. During this internship we got the opportunity to visit various units in the hospital and gained knowledge about the systems and machines used in the units. During the internship visiting physician of the dialysis unit addressed us with a problem. The problem was that they were unable to monitor the blood potassium level of the patients during the dialysis treatment. Currently it is done by doing a blood test before and after dialysis which is a time consuming and painful method. So, a solution which involves real time monitoring of blood potassium level in a non-invasive approach was required.

We did both the background check and literature review related to this problem, to find a feasible solution. We had several ideas in our mind to solve this problem. During that time, we applied to HackX 2019 which was organized by University of Kelaniya. Out of 160+ teams we were selected to the semifinals where we pitched our idea. We got selected to the top 13 teams out of 30 teams who pitched their innovations at the semifinals. That’s where we started to face many issues because converting an idea to a working prototype is really challenging. Following are the main challenges we faced during prototyping:

1. There aren’t any available data sets which can be used for our solutions.
2. A user-friendly implementation was needed to hide the complexity of the solution
3. An architecture for implementation.
4. The lack of knowledge in this domain.
5. One-month time period to implement the solution to present at the finals.

We never gave up on our efforts, as a team we worked together to overcome these challenges and only advantage we had was the non- academic staff strike. We visited Panadura Base hospital 5 days per week until three days before the finals to collect necessary data from the dialysis unit. I would like to thank the doctor in the dialysis unit, since without his support we wouldn’t be able to get the necessary data. With parallel to data collection we started learning and working on Sensing the signal, bio signal processing, IoT implementation, Feature Extraction, App development, Machine learning and prototype designing.

We gained great support from our Biomedical lecturer Dr. Anjula Desilva, who spent his valuable time in enlightening us with the concepts in bio signal processing and clearing our doubts related to the problems we faced in our approach.

The day came, our countless efforts and sleepless nights were rewarded on that day, where we emerged as Runners up at HackX 2019, being the only biomedical project in the finals. Later we went on to win hackathons such as SLIOT, BRAINSTORM, IEEE Innovation Nation and MORAVENTURES. It was a great experience and we were blessed with the best team. We gained a lot of insights from the professionals in the industry through these hackathons which helped us a lot.

The team behind this success consists of Jonaththan Johnny (ENTC, IoT implementation), Vinith (BME, Electronics and Business analyst), Mithunjha (BME, Machine learning), Thuvarahan (CSE, Mobile App Development), Kaushalya (BME, Enclosure design) and me (BME, Bio signal processing, Feature extraction and PCB design). Innovating and prototyping a new idea in medical field is challenging but not as challenging as converting it to a final product to reach the market. Also, the path of a medical product reaching the market is more challenging than any other products, because it must go through many testing and approvals. I will share the knowledge gained from the professionals in industry related to this in a different article. See you then.

SUMMARY

A quick guide, tips and tricks in getting started with your biomedical project.

1. Have a good bond with the medical community. (VERY IMPORTANT)
2. Do researches to identify the problems in health care.
3. Carry out literature review and come up with variety of solutions for an identified problem.
4. Brainstorm and select the most feasible one. Remember you must think in the perspective of the end user as well.
5. Do a market research as well to learn about competitor products.
6. Create an architecture for implementation.
7. Get insights from the lecturers and seniors. ( This really helped us in our progress)
8. Create a prototype to Validate your idea. Validation is utmost important to move forward.
9. Make your project unique.

#CHEERS
#BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING