Engineering on Human Body

Engineering is kind of approach with which human kind try to make their life better in any point of view. It’s more than just applied science, because engineering can directly serve the human life. However, sometimes it’s too hard to determine where the scientist’s work ends and the engineer’s begins. Nowadays people can feel that their life is served by engineering works. That’s why Alfred P. Sloan Jr., for many years President of General Motor Corporation, said “The engineer typifies the twentieth century. Without his genius and vast contribution he has made in design, engineering, and production on material side of our existence, our contemporary life could never has reached its present standard”.

Among those branches of engineering, there is the one that is really close to the human body. So this kind of engineering doesn’t only serve the human need like electronic product but also serve the human body itself. That one is Biomedical Engineering, in which engineers try to work on something that can help doctor’s works. Couple days ago an international conference on biomedical engineering was held in Surabaya and fortunately I was one of the committees. My rules was actually not really important because all I needed to do was just to sit beside the moderator and prepare the file of every presenter on each parallel season. But, I could precisely follow their presentations, although I didn’t really understand their terms.

The presenters come from different background of disciplines but they presented the same themes. There was mechanical, electrical, and even aeronautics engineering. But mostly they were electrical engineers.

Here, I could really see the application of math and physics on another side of life, the application of math and physics on human body. Their papers mostly used applied mathematics in case of representing the human body activities. The method of signal processing was even used in this application. Because almost all of activity in our body is unpredictable, the method they used also raised some annoying error that could be danger in real assembling. That’s why; most of research that was brought into papers here was still in progress.

Biomedical engineering is somehow very interesting, because it’s not a single discipline of knowledge but more like multidisciplinary work.