The range of projects falling under the bioengineering umbrella is diverse and far-reaching. Some of the principal fields include artificial intelligence, biological microsensor fabrication, manufacturing of surgical instruments, sports medicine and sports injury research. The program started in the late 1960s. In the first experiments, researchers attempted to measure the pressure along a ski during normal skiing. The project continued long after these experiments, however, with the focus and testing equipment changing along the way.
Current research is centered around alpine snow skiing, which produces complex loading at the knee.
This load can be represented by three force and three moment components. Safety requires the bindings to release before loading reaches a level where it could injure the knee. Bindings can be designed to release when the set of three moment components at the knee falls outside of the moment envelope. The forces and moments acting on the bindings are related to the three moment components at the knee through a predetermined model. The project's purpose is to determine the moment envelopes at the knee and the force and moment envelopes at the toe and heel bindings during normal skiing, and evaluate the characteristic space of the envelopes.