When doctors place sensors and other electronic devices in or on the body, they can become stretched and bent which can break them or reduce their efficiency.
“To make bioelectronics that work well even under stress, we need to understand how the properties of soft and hard materials behave when they’re deformed. Then we can counteract those changes with clever mechanics and responsive materials that react to the deformations and retain wireless connectivity,” said Raudel Avila, assistant professor of mechanical engineering (MECH) at Rice University.
Avila has been awarded a $20,000 Research Initiation Grant from the Applied Mechanics Division of the American Society of Mechanical Engineering. The grant is sponsored by the Haythornthwaite Foundation and goes to faculty conducting research in theoretical and applied mechanics. Raudel’s is one of five issued this year to researchers in the United States.
“Our research,” Avila said, “will help us understand how to design future bioelectronic devices from the mechanical and electromagnetic perspective so they can respond to these mechanical challenges.”
Avila earned his Ph.D. in MECH from Northwestern University this year and joined the Rice faculty on July 1.
His research combines mechanics, materials and electromagnetics to engineer bioelectronics for health care and biomedical applications. He is developing a theoretical and computational framework to study the scalability, packaging, power limitations, tissue interactions and energy absorption in such devices.