Mandy Draws

Media: vinyl cut

 

This piece was designed as public wall art for the Lurie Biomedical Engineering Building at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. This is the building where I spent the majority of my undergraduate experience.

 

This artwork depicts a waving robotic hand. It encompasses the different facets of the field of biomedical engineering, from the electrical to the physiological, to the mechanical aspects of this multidisciplinary field. The circuit shown is a simplified diagram of a student team’s bio-instrumentation project designed to control a robotic hand, consisting of an initial EMG acquisition step (electromyography: shows electrical activity in muscles from neural stimulation) followed by a PWM generation step (pulse width modulation: shows the amplitude/strength of the signal). The subsequent electromyograph trace is derived from the Chestek group, which represents the signals sent via a regenerative peripheral nerve interface to the robotic hand: a stylized version of the one used by this group and other research groups.

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The artwork was designed on Procreate and assembled on Adobe Illustrator.​