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In the project that I am currently working, we investigate how standing exercises can help with the loss of bone mass in people that have paraplegia due to a spinal cord injury.

Paraplegia, a condition that means that there is no sensation or voluntary motion in the lower part of the body, creates further health issues one of which is the loss of bone mass in the legs. This is because there is no movement and no forces on the bone which are necessary to maintain a healthy bone.

By using electrical stimulation technology we can stimulate the paraplegic muscles and have people stand up and then exercise. We measure any changes in bone before starting the exercises and after months of weekly exercise in an effort to find how these exercises will help the bones.

To fully understand what parts of exercise and standing help, we use equipment such as force sensors and motion capture cameras which we couple with our in-house built electrical stimulation device. We have also created a video game which can be played during the exercising so that it is more enjoyable!

A typical day would be taken mostly by experiments along with the admin work surrounding them, followed by fixing any issues that might arise or creating and improving any part of the equipment. The rest of the working day would be spend at either analysing data that we recorded from the experiments, or writing.

Writing is a big part of academic work schedule – this could be preparing papers that formally present our research, research grants and ideas for future funding, emails, news items on the project’s website, and many more (this text for example 🙂 )