Researcher Spotlight: An Interview With Kithmin Wickramasinghe
By: Rochelle Silva
Tags: Undergraduate, Biomedical, Electronics, Machine Learning, Research

Can you tell me about the research component you had in your curriculum?

I was properly introduced to research and the scientific process through the final year project. Before that, I did an internship in Tokyo, which was geared toward research, but I didn’t evaluate my methods much due to the inexperience I had back then, and just gained experience in a particular field of applied research.

My final year group project was a really interesting point of my research profile. We went to get a project from Dr. Simon Lind Kappel and he straight away had an ideal project for us. We started to work in a motivated manner with a parallel software and hardware approach, but our group had very limited experience in research. I did not even know how to write a citation properly. All the experience I had gained until then was in hands-on building robots and circuits and devices. So, this was a challenging task for our group, especially in the hardware scope of the proposed project.

Luckily our supervisor was also someone who had gone through what we were facing and was an excellent supportive strength to us. He would fill us with so many neat ideas whenever we were faced with a dilemma. We had to evaluate our problem scenario and propose an ideal solution that we could implement and show the evaluation panel. Even though in the end, we ended up doing one of the best projects Dr. Simon had ever supervised, it’s the journey and the planning that matters here, and that’s what I want to share. The thing with hardware projects is; you can’t just plan to finish the project the exact high quality and the fully functional way you want to, within a given deadline; and that’s the fundamental problem you have to deal with.

The final year project group (ignore my beard) (Photo provided by Kithmin)

What do you mean you can’t just plan to finish the project by a given deadline?

There are sooooo many obstacles in comparison to a software project.

· You have to come up with the most suitable design,

· You have to look for the most suitable components,

· You have to buy those components by going through so many different places in the most cost-efficient ways possible to save your money,

· You have to wait for different types of shipping methods to deliver your stuff and for the delays involved in each,

· You have to fix and solder everything together (SMD soldering an entire PCB is no easy task),

· You have to test and find out the issues involved in the design,

· and then you have to go through the above process once more.

And if you figure those things out, then here are project funding barriers involved –

· Where are you going to find the money to buy and pay for tax and shipping?

· How is your team going to share money and manage other expenses as well?

· How can you get them on time before the evaluation deadlines?

· How can you make sure you do as few mistakes as possible in your design to avoid too many iterations?

And believe me, in order to finalize a design, we have to do this iteration at least thrice or more! (only twice if we are lucky and really skilled!)

How does figuring out solutions to all of these connect? Can you explain using your research project?

Our final year group project was under the topic ”Development of a Cost-effective sEMG Sensor System for Controlling Bionic Arms”. The outcome of this project was to design a cost-effective, re-usable, wearable device of a small form factor that ensures real-time feedback and comfortability despite long-duration usage. This had to be achieved with the use of dry contact surface electrode technology, device and sensor circuit design factors with ergonomic design principles, real-time digital signal processing and data communication, and machine learning, as well as bionic hand control feedback.

This is the overall picture and full overview of the challenge that is involved in hardware research. It’s not just about getting down modules and connecting them together to build a nice outcome. It must be elegantly done with a professional engineering touch. This is what I mean:

Image provided by Kithmin

And for us, an added challenge which had rarely (or maybe never) been done in the department before, was to perform hardware-level testing of bioelectrical parameters, with the limited and available lab resources. It was quite interesting to figure out solutions for all these challenges within the given time constraint of the final year project.