Research on improving cardiac pacemakers wins award for Southampton graduate engineer
MEng Acoustical Engineering graduate Harriet Lea-Banks has been honoured by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for her paper on cardiac pacemakers.
Harriet, who graduated in July 2014, wrote it with colleagues at the University of Oxford during her three month summer placement at the Computer Science department; the paper was judged the best at the IEEE’s International Conference on Healthcare Informatics in Verona.
During the summer, Harriet created a virtual heart model to look at how sensors within pacemakers could detect different levels of activity in the patient and modify pacing accordingly; she also explored how a detection algorithm could be used to quantify these adjustments.
“More than 40,000 people in England have a pacemaker fitted, but there is still scope to improve their performance,” she explains. “I was delighted our paper was presented at the conference and went on to win an award. My time at the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research (ISVR) at Southampton has been incredibly important in inspiring me to pursue research.”
Harriet is about to start a PhD in Biomedical Engineering at Oxford, where she will investigate how drugs can be delivered in the human body through microbubbles and ultrasound.
www.veriware.org/
www.veriware.org/papers/KLMP14a.pdf