Ongoing engineering rereasch being conducted by Dr. Drazan discovers interesting findings in how people move.
One morning this past spring, School of Engineering and Computing graduate assistant and former Division I field hockey player Laia Vancells-Lopez was wearing electromyography sensors attached to her body to measure muscle activation patterns in her lower leg.
The exercises she was performing were part of an ongoing biomechanical engineering study in the Community Situated Biomechanics Lab, located in the Innovation Annex on the southwest corner of campus.
Vancells-Lopez completed a series of jumps and exercises while assistant professor of biomedical engineering John Drazan, PhD, and graduate research assistant John Minogue viewed the data on a large screen on the lab’s back wall.
Their research is focused on musculoskeletal biomechanics — the study of how people move, how they get injured, and how to prevent injuries. It is a subject Dr. Drazan is deeply passionate about.
Dr. Drazan is not your ordinary engineer researcher. A former college basketball player, he wasn’t originally interested in pursuing a career in the STEM field. That all changed, he said, when his high school physics teacher showed him how to apply physics to sports.
“He introduced me to the entire field of sports science, and all of a sudden I knew why I had been learning calculus and physics. I could use the impulse momentum theorem (a formula for calculating how the power of an impulse translates into action) to calculate how high I could jump, based on the force I’m producing. Or, use parabolic arcs to understand how the ball goes into the basket when I take a jump shot. This was transformative for me.”
“Sports, and studying sports through a scientific lens, was the spark that led me into my entire career,” Dr. Drazan continued, “so being able to do biomechanics research now professionally, both for musculoskeletal health and sports performance, is outrageously exciting.”
John Minogue, Laia Vancells-Lopez, and Dr. Drazan look at data collected from the sensors.
The Achilles tendon, Dr. Drazan’s particular area of research, is a band of tissue vital to ankle biomechanics and general human movement. The ankle, he explained, rotates when you’re tipping forward. This energy is stored in the tendon, then released to push yourself forward to be caught by the other leg – offering humans a very energy-efficient mode of locomotion.
To further his injury prevention research, Dr. Drazan collects data to better understand the biomechanics of the ankle. Both in the lab and outside, he uses a combination of state-of-the-art equipment and low-cost, student-designed mobile devices.
In the lab, he and his research assistants use wireless electromyography devices to track activity patterns in muscles. Infrared cameras and motion tracking equipment record and digitize the movements of a person wearing reflective markers. The lab’s instrumented force plates measure the gravitational forces an individual applies during different movements.
Outside the lab, data is collected using an instrumented insole sensor in the form of a shoe insert, called Loadsol.
“One of the great things about being at Fairfield is working with undergrads and inviting them to help me solve problems we face in research,” he said.
Learn more about the Master of Science in Biomedical Engineering program at fairfield.edu/biomedical.
