Analysis of Function and Proposal

It has been a tiring week. I just had one week of intensive module on Analysis of Function. It's mainly targeted for the MSc Physiotherapy, but I guess I took the chance of taking this module. The module is interesting and the delivery of the lectures were excellent. It's just some of the lingo were a bit off from my day-to-day practice as a podiatrist. This was more like an engineering course and we had an engineer onsite to help us out. It sounded more like experimenting rockets! lol. For the whole week, we put human physiology and abnormal conditions aside, it was more of the fundamentals of physics integrated into the human movement like force, moment, torque etc in relation to the human joints and soft tissues. There were also elements of critical evaluation of research within the subjects. On a fair note, I appreciate reading human movement related articles more now than before, that I have actually able to see the bias in many papers published.

For the whole week, I was able to operate and critically analyse the benefits and pitfalls of many equipments which some cost hundreds of thousand pounds! I looked and operated on the force plate, the vicon and coda 3D analysis, EMG (electromyography), the ultrasound machine, the biodex and improved my skills on the use of F-scan pressure measurement. Below are some of the sights and situations that I had to endure over the week.







And those machines are not just for trial. We had to experiment it on almost a real scale! You can just imagine that I came home everyday knackered!!! Running on a treadmill after lunch, with strappings and without proper pre and post exercises measure, NOT A GOOD IDEA!!!

Yesterday, I had my dissertation meeting day. It was difficult but surely an eye opening to making sure we were on the right track. My research plan was somehow all over the place partly because they knew nothing what I was talking about. I then turned my my own personal tutor and he was enthusiastic about it. He even gave me his recent publication (which kind of similar study)to look at.

I'm hoping it will run smoothly. I'll be looking at the prevalence of foot pain among rheumatoid patients in Brunei as we have not got a rheumatology specialist podiatrist (hint hint!!) ahahha.