Elaine Keegan - A tech4health student’s view on Northern Ireland Biomedical Engineering Society’s (NIBES) 2026 Annual Symposium

On Thursday 14th May 2026 myself, along with Alastair Martin and Phoebe King, attended the Northern Ireland Biomedical Engineering Society (NIBES) Annual Symposium. NIBES originated in 1979 and is led by academics from both Ulster University (UU) and Queen's University Belfast (QUB). It is dedicated to encouraging and developing collaborative links between research teams, universities, industry and clinicians to further develop medical devices and all things Biomedical Engineering. Please check out the website here: https://sites.google.com/view/nibes/home  

The current president of NIBES, a Senior Lecturer at Ulster University, Dr Jonathan Acheson said “It was great to see such breadth and depth of Biomedical Engineering research from across the different institutions in Northern Ireland with a particular highlight being the excellent Tech4Health Centre for Doctoral Training”. 

I joined the student committee for NIBES in September 2025 alongside several PhD students from UU and QUB, part of our role is to help organise the symposium, which was held in UU this year. Alastair, Phoebe and I, all submitted abstracts and were selected for the longer presentation sessions.  

I was the first up with my presentation on “Optimising Acceleration Thresholds to Estimate Supine-to-Stand Durations During the Active Stand Test” where I spoke about my recent work using different algorithms to calculate stand times from accelerometery data. The aim for this work is to reduce the human error in measuring standing times, and taking these times into account for assessment of the cerebral autoregulation system.  

Alastair was later in the day with his presentation on “Exploration of Knee Replacement Assessment using Smart Insoles” where he spoke about analysing how people walk to measure how effective replacement knee surgery has been. Traditionally this is done using expensive pressure sensitive treadmills in a hospital setting. Alastair presented the initial results of using a much cheaper smart insole-based gait assessment system. He outlined the successes and challenges of trying to obtain clinically significant results more easily and at lower cost. 

Finally Phoebe presented her talk on “Patient-Specific Blood Sensing: Prototyping Microfluidic Channels” where she discussed her recent work developing prototype devices for platelet dynamic studies, from digital modelling through to fabrication using spin coating, laser engineering, final assembly, and leak testing. These prototypes will support initial blood flow studies in Antrim Area Hospital. The presentation also explored algorithm development to analyse the data collected during these studies, alongside a brief overview of her other recent work on algorithm development for fetomaternal haemorrhage screening. 

At the end of the day there were awards for best rapid fire talk and best overall talk, we were all delighted when Alastair was announced as the best overall presentation of the day. He also got awarded one of the fun prizes from the day as the first abstract submitted! – Well done Alastair!