Dr. Haneesh Kesari is an Associate Professor of Engineering at Brown University. He is affiliated with the Solid Mechanics group and the PI of the Applied Mechanics Lab. His current research focuses on developing algorithms and infrastructure to understand, predict, and prevent traumatic brain injury, which we will be delving into during this interview.
Q: Just in simpler terms for our viewers, can you give an overview of your research and its applications?
A: My lab uses a combination of mathematical modeling and experimental techniques to understand various phenomena. One of the mechanical phenomena that we have been recently interested in is injury because of trauma, like brain injury and trauma to the human body (because our body is still mechanical). Forces and the stresses that act on the body can injure us – so is there a rational scientific theory of how those forces translate to injury? That is what I am interested in.
Q: You mentioned most of the research that takes place in your lab, but what ultimately do you hope to achieve with this work? What do you see as the main environment of use for your research?
A: There are three main ways I hope that my research will affect people. For example, if you get a cut on your finger, you’ll feel the pain and you can see the blood. But what is so insidious about brain injury is first of all, if there is any kind of injury inside the brain, you can’t see or feel the bleeding. So the only way is that after some time, people will start showing things like cognitive decline, sleep problems, and depression. But by that time, it’s already too late. When you are performing activities, what if technology could tell you that the activity is harming your brain and you should stop? So the first application is constantly tracking the health of the brain.
The second avenue is changing protocols for certain activities. One way we tested this was monitoring the acceleration and force on the brain as we moved on a high-speed boat at sea state 3, which is a certain sea condition for riding a boat. Based on the results of monitoring the brain, one can determine if the protocol for the boat patrols should be changed.
The last avenue is designing protective gear. Comparing the effect of activities on the brain with and without gear can show if the gear is working well enough. This would be much more effective than the current design process of dropping helmets and seeing how much damage comes to the helmet rather than seeing what happens to a live human being.
Tech Talks Insight: Dr. Kesari’s work heavily incorporates different routes of testing. These testing protocols are built into several different fields. He detailed his testing in the context of using cadavers to test survival during aircraft crashes. His technology recreated the motion of the cadaver during crashes in order to gather kinematic information that was necessary to make safety changes to the design of the aircraft.
Another example of this testing and application was when Dr. Kesari tested the securing of a mannequin to a board. During this process, he monitored the amount of acceleration and force that the head was under as it was shaken. He believes this is a potential application for training nurses to be careful during patient handling and as a real-time indicator of how to move a patient.
Q: What did it look like to get to this point? What does your process look like?
A: To be honest, it is hard for me to say because I do not stop to process my split-second decisions while I am going through this process. But let me say that it did take several, several years. I will also say that this all started when looking at the rudimentary physics behind developing football helmets. I developed TIGER, the equipment and algorithms to measure acceleration throughout the brain and body, to create a better way to design these helmets with sound mathematical reasoning.
Q: What is the biggest hardship you faced while working on this research?
It sounds crazy, right? Like you just put four sensors on your head and you can figure out how the person moved. I could be wearing the sensors here at Brown and you could in real time see exactly how I’m moving. That seems like too big of a claim.
We are able to reproduce the entire motion of the body without skin connection. So the biggest hurdle I found was getting people to believe that this was possible. That was the biggest hurdle for me because right now it works and I can show it, but as I’m saying that I’m a kind of a mathematician. I knew it would work because my equation said it would. So we had to show them the applications of our work in practice. This took a lot of work and still faced disbelief even after the work was shown. When reproducing motion, we would have to show side by side that it was actually recreating live motion.
Q: What previous technology has informed your work?
A: One thing that really did help my research progress was the fact that the sensors that needed to be worn were miniaturized at the time that my research was happening. Without the innovation behind the fitbit and similar devices, my research would not be at the stage it is at.
Q: What connections do you have with different industries and do you see your technology being commercialized?
Right now we are working on perfecting our work. I do think our work will be most helpful and useful for civilians. They will use it in everyday activities and while taking on new potentially unsafe endeavors. However, the development of the work and the initial product will come through the military because of the funding. I am also focused mainly on the development of this technology and not an expert in its dissemination. So if some interested parties do come forward, that would be great.
Q: Finally, how do you involve students in your work?
Most of the time, it starts off with us scribbling equations. It’s me and my students, so the workflow is pretty much the same. We have a question, we try to solve it, and then we solve it.
Then what we do is we convert that into a simulation. That is basically a computer program that will recreate the situation for a more complicated situation. So it works there. They do a lot of the computer programming. Then the next step is that we are going to create something for real. So then they go and buy the parts and the sensors, 3D print the structures, and then assemble it.
Then we try it out in the lab. If we hit a soccer ball, can you capture it? If we drop a dummy down a flight of stairs, will it work? Then we go back to our collaborators and say, ‘we have solved the problem. You wanted to figure out how much strain is in the neck if a person falls off a truck, and we know how we can do it.’ And then they’ll say, ‘What did you do?’
If we had shown them the equation or the computations, they wouldn’t believe it. So we show them the lab experiments. Then they say, oh, but these lab experiments are not very realistic. This is not like a real person falling on a real platform. So they set us up with some collaborators, like that big cadaver drop test in the airplane fuselage.
As you can see, they do a lot of hands-on work and are integral to experimentation and creation.
Tech Talks Insight: Dr. Kesari’s work is one of a kind in the current research front, as can be seen from his invitation to present his work at the 2023 White House Demo Day. However, what really sets his work apart is the versatility and the dedication that he has shown. Dr. Kesari goes above and beyond to test and perfect each stage of his work, work with many different industries, and create understandable representations of his progress to show other people the potential impact of his work. We cannot wait to see what he will continue to do!