BME 458 is a combination Biomedical Engineering and Electrical Engineering course offered at the University of Michigan. The course description is as follows; Students design and construct functioning biomedical instruments. Hardware includes instrumentation amplifiers and active filters constructed using operational amplifiers. Signal acquisition, processing analysis and display are performed. Project modules include measurement or respiratory volume and flow rates, biopotentials (electrocardiogram), and optical analysis of arterial blood oxygen saturation (pulse-oximetry).

Students were permitted to choose their own final projects provided they utilized technology covered previously in the course. My group chose to use electrical potentials of the muscles to control a small model car, as a way to make rehabilitation of unused muscles more interesting.

Final Project Presentation

Final Car Design

We purchased a motorized toy car for our project, and then used two relays to act as electronic switches to open or close the circuit between the motors and the batteries to turn on and off the motors. As each motor was controlled separately, the car could be steered by alternately turning on each motor, or turning both on at once to move straight forward.