In lectures, he favors dialogue over one-way delivery and regularly calls on students to keep them engaged. His research, conducted primarily in collaboration with orthopedic surgeons, aims to be of practical benefit in clinical settings. He also maintains a personal regimen of strength training.
Through the full arc of a manufacturing project—from design and fabrication with 3D CAD/CAM, to circuit design using general-purpose software, and finally hand soldering and assembly—students gain first-hand experience of the making process.
This research develops instrumentation capable of measuring the forces actually exerted on artificial joints, work that draws equally on mechanical design and electronic circuit design. Measurements taken during surgery allow the surgeon to judge appropriate soft-tissue tension, while measurements taken afterward reveal the mechanical conditions the implant itself experiences. These forces can also be estimated computationally, alongside direct measurement, through musculoskeletal computer models.
By combining musculoskeletal computer models with computational software (MATLAB) to calculate the force generated by individual muscles, students build practical programming skills.
This research calculates the tension generated by individual muscles during various movements, such as walking and performing squats. Using motion-capture equipment to record actual movement, the work develops original computational formulas for deriving muscle force. In fact, precisely which muscles are engaged, and to what degree, during a given movement remains poorly understood. Calculating muscle force is therefore essential to making strength training and rehabilitation more effective.