Smart clothing for muscle control impresses in national Engineers in Business Competition
Postgraduate research student Devon Lewis from the University of Southampton has finished second in the UK Engineers in Business Competition (EIBC) Champion of Champions Final with smart clothing that can monitor and enhance muscle performance.
The neuroscience researcher was the runner-up in the Start-Up category of the online Dragons’ Den-style competition with an innovative solution to improve injury recovery and overall sports performance.
Devon is exploring interfaces with the nervous system for the control of neuroprostheses in his PhD research, which is supervised by the School of Engineering’s Professor David Simpson and Professor Liudi Jiang, and Biological Sciences’ Professor Philip Newland.
He is launching a new start-up business called Inpulse that will give people, from world-class athletes to patients suffering from neurological disorders, the best possible control of their muscles.
“I’m fascinated by the idea that we can directly activate our muscles non-invasively with small electrical currents,” he says. “The way our nervous system coordinates movements of the body is incredibly complex, and problems can arise at any stage, leading to a huge range of movement disorders.
“Conventional approaches usually seek to identify and improve specific biological issues, but we can use electrical stimulation to bypass all of these issues and treat everything from minor tremors to complete paralysis without drugs or invasive surgery. Inpulse is my solution.”