Profile

I’m a Meath man studying for a PhD in UCD.

When I left school I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but engineering seemed like a good choice… I liked maths, technical drawing, and tinkering with things to see how they worked.
After a couple of years in college, I thought engineering might have been a mistake. That was until I took a module in neuroscience.

I know. Engineering and neuroscience are worlds apart, especially when one has never opened a biology book before in their entire life.
But I soon discovered that engineering is not too far removed from any subject.

Engineering applies to everything.
When I saw videos like this, and this, and this, then I knew I wanted to study biomedical engineering.
In particular, neural engineering – I wanted to solve problems of the brain.

Since then, I have designed my own brain computer interface (or BCI) and now I work with doctors to help people with Parkinson’s disease to improve their symptoms.

When I’m not working, I like to play Canoe Polo, watch loads of movies, and eat Indian food.

Hey! My name’s Matt.

I’m an electronic engineering PhD student in UCD who loves all things biomedical.
In short, my research aims to help doctors to diagnose neurodegenerative diseases by recording electrical signals from human muscle.

Neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson’s disease and Huntington’s disease, occur when certain parts of the brain stop working and the brain can’t control the body’s movement properly.
When this happens, symptoms such as tremor (shaking arms and legs), muscle rigidity (stiff muscles), and postural instability (wobbliness) start to happen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZMFNYgnCJU&ab_channel=ParkinsonsNGO

These symptoms can make life very difficult for people to do everyday tasks – standing up, walking to the shops, cooking, cleaning, playing sports, etc.
So, it is very important for doctors to diagnose people with neurodegenerative disease as early as possible so that they can stop the symptoms from getting worse.

Here’s what I do:
I record tiny electrical signals from muscle – electromyography – and then I look for hidden patterns in the signals which might tell us if somebody has Parkinson’s disease or not.
To look for these hidden patterns, I use a branch of maths called chaos theory.
Chaos theory is a way of looking at a dynamical system – like the human body, a car, a colony of ants, or anything with lots of moving parts – to try to find out how all those parts work together in time.

Here are some of the analytical techniques from chaos theory that I use:

• Fractals – a way of looking for recurring patterns.
  Intro to Fractals // What are Fractals??? // Ted Talk on Fractals
  Fractals Explained // Application of Fractal Geometry // Mandelbrot Fractals
• Entropy – a way of measuring randomness.
  Advanced Intro to Entropy
• Determinism – a way of finding how structured (deterministic) a signal is.Check out this animation to understand of determinism is calculated!

So, by taking fancy maths techniques and applying them to muscle signals, we can find ways to detect disease! Simples! 🙂

Up at 7am.
I get to the office at 8.45.
I pick up my equipment and go to the hospital for 9.15.

At the hospital, I perform experiments with patients who have Parkinson’s disease.
These experiments can take from 1.5-2 hours.

I get back to my desk around 11.30am.
There, I process the data I collected to make sure it’s correct.
Then I start to write computer code to run some data analysis software, or to simulate a model of the human body.

I have lunch at 1.30pm.

Some days I’m a tutor for a engineering course, so if I’m not teaching, I’m correcting assignements.

Around 3pm, I continue with my computer simulations or I will spend a couple of hours reading research articles.

I leave work around 5.30-6pm.