Detecting Tiny Tremors
What do earthquakes and babies' brainwaves have in common?
Keith Newman profiles a leading-edge device for monitoring neonatal brain activity.
Gordon MacDonald's background in signal processing, underwater acoustics and seismic exploration have come in handy when refining and marketing the BRM2 Brain Monitor. Mr MacDonald, Research and Development Manager for BrainZ Instruments, was part of the team that inherited the development of innovative brain monitoring technology from engineers at the Liggins Institute, part of the Auckland University School of Medicine.
While brain monitors are in high demand, most are expensive, cumbersome, and difficult to move around. The compact computerised electroencephalography (EEG) unit marketed by BrainZ Instruments costs a fraction of the price of most of its competitors, and can easily be deployed alongside an infant warmer or incubator.
To date about 200 units of the BRM2 Brain Monitor, which looks like a touch screen on a pole, have been sold into 16 countries. The instrument is now in all neonatal intensive care units in New Zealand and in hospitals in Australia, the United States, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, France and other European countries. That there might be common ground between earthquakes that shake the planet and tiny tremors in a baby's brain is difficult to grasp. However, Mr MacDonald insists there are conceptual similarities: "I'm still signal processing, still involved in data acquisition." He suggests the seismic industry is a very mature industry in which billions of dollars have been spent on research and development, making it a very good model in these areas where issues overlap.
What really motivates him is the will to discover how "you actually turn volts that apparently don't have any information into something that really is in formative".
This case study is reproduced with permission from e.nz magazine. Subscriptions to e.nz are discounted for schools and TENZ members.
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