ello! We are a team of five students at the University of Sheffield and we bring to you, the world of                  Bioengineering! When we first started applying to University, we had very little knowledge of what Bioengineering actually was. So when we gathered early November last year to work on this project, we decided to dedicate it to its awareness. So what is Bioengineering? 

 

Bioengineering is an interdisciplinary field where engineering meets medicine. As students of bioengineering, we study electronics, maths, computer science, control engineering, materials science, medical physics and biology. Control and feedback are important aspects of bioengineering. This is because a lot of systems in our bodies, particularly the nervous system, depend on feedback to control output. For instance, when your finger is accidentally pricked by a pin, that stimulus is sent to the brain and you respond by pulling your finger away. This shows how your body reacts and how your bain controls the response depending on what information is sent to it. 

 

When designing bioengineering systems outside the body, we also rely on control and feedback. For example, a brain computer interface channels communication between the brain and an external device, such as a prosthetic arm. The brain controls the way the hand wants to move by sending EEG signals, Electrodes pick up these signals, process them and send them to a computer. The computer will tell the prosthetic arm what to do and the arm responds by moving. The performance of the prosthetic arm is judged by the user. Besides the brain computer interface, other applications that this resource will be discussing are functional electrical stimulation, action potentials, neural networks, cochlear implants and exoskeletons. 

WHAT IS CONTROL SYSTEMS ENGINEERING?

Control systems engineering is an interdisciplinary branch of engineering and mathematics that deals with the behaviour of dynamical systems with inputs, and how their behaviour is modified by feedback.

 

Feedback is a common and powerful tool used when designing a control system. Feedback loops take the system output into consideration, which enables the system to adjust its performance to meet a desired output performance.

 

As bioengineers, we focus on the applications of feedback and control theory in medicine and healthcare, especially the natural feedback mechanisms present in the human body and the medical applications that incorporate neurological feedback to increase the quality of life of disabled patients.

 

THE NERVOUS SYSTEM

The nervous system consists of the brain, spinal cord, sensory organs and neurons. Neurons from the brain and spinal cord branch out to every part of the body. Together, these organs are responsible for the control and feedback of the body. The organ system does this by extracting information from the environment using sensory receptors, sending signals that encode this information into the central nervous system, processing the information to determine an appropriate response, and sending output signals to muscles or glands to activate the response. The muscles or glands that produce a response are called effectors. The whole process forms a part of a complex human feedback network, which is an example of a control system where the output is the reaction or performance of the body, for example, secretion by a gland or movement of a muscle. The input is the stimulus and the feedback is the human judgement of the performance. This could be internal, for example a rise in blood sugar level or external, seeing how fast you are running in a race. The system is the human body overall, but more particularly is the nervous system which can detect a stimulus, produce an appropriate output and judge performance. Desired performance is achieved through feedback, internal and external. 

 

As you can tell, the theme for this website is NEUROSCIENCE! This website is proudly brought to you by Nerds & Nerves. We are truly fascinated by the way the nervous system works and we hope you find this website useful in understanding bioengineering and control systems better.