Question: Ted, when you say you work with robotics and biomedical engineering, what do you mean?

Ted Burke answered on 4 Mar 2019:

Sometimes I work on them separately and sometimes together. One area where they come together is robotics prostheses. For example, when an amputee wears a robotic arm, one way they can control it is using electrical signals recorded from muscles around the chest and shoulder. That way, some of the same muscles that previously controlled their original arm now control the robot arm.

As robots become more common in our daily lives, they will increase the independence of people who currently rely heavily on human carers. Some of those robots don’t necessarily seem like “biomedical” technology, but they could really improve the quality of life of some people with disabilities.

My own primary interest in biomedical technology is recording and analysing signals from the human body, especially to let a person control a computer. In the future, this could play a part in how humans physically interact with (or control) robots.