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Perfect blend of dance and science inspires breakthrough neural prostheses
For Shriya, the love for dance equals the passion for research, but recently, she has been able to draw parallels between the two disciplines
Shriya Srinivasan / Images- Supplied
For several amputees today, living an everyday life remains elusive. The reasons are many, such as limited access to good prosthetics, costly maintenance, limited mobility, and lack of awareness. Social stigma is yet another significant challenge. Imagine, amidst all this, being handed over a realm of possibility that they thought was completely out of reach – a prosthesis that feels like an extension of one’s body so much that they can sense contact with an object even with closed eyes.
That’s what Dr. Shriya Srinivasan’s innovative amputation approach is all about - empowering people to lead a happier and healthier life by enhancing their sensation and mobility.
Born and brought up in the States, Shriya’s parents ensured her a well-rounded upbringing. From the very beginning, her mother, Guru Sujatha Srinivasan, inculcated the rigor and grace of Bharatanatyam dance in her. She was also actively involved in swimming, tennis, and playing instruments like piano and violin. Since her extended family was in India, she would visit her grandparents every summer and treat herself to ancestral stories, tasty homemade meals, and family traditions.
During her formative years, Shriya witnessed how some of her friends, family members, and acquaintances struggled to live with neuromuscular disorders. The experiences, heartbreaking, though, fuelled her passion for the biomedical field, specifically prosthetics. In due course of time, she graduated in biomedical engineering from Case Western Reserve University.
She advanced her academic pursuits by earning a doctorate from the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). As a researcher at MIT, she invented two groundbreaking surgical techniques aimed at helping individuals with prosthetic limbs regain a sense of touch. Currently, Shriya is an assistant professor of bioengineering at Harvard University where she directs the Harvard Biohybrid Organs and Neuroprosthetics (BIONICS) lab.
When asked about the core mission of her work, Shriya says, “Traditionally, professionals in the surgical domain are siloed from those in the engineering or scientific domain. This separation sometimes leads to a gap between the design of medical devices and their compatibility with the human body. My work aims to bridge that gap.” The Harvard professor shares that she was involved with the development of a surgeries that restore proprioception- the sense of how our muscles and joints move.
Patients undergoing this procedure have exhibited greater control over their prostheses vis-a-vis traditional amputation. “This procedure has seen implementation in over 50 patients, and witnessing a transformation in their lives has been immensely gratifying – the potential this holds for advanced prostheses is exciting.”
The future prospects of advanced prostheses look promising to Shriya, mainly because they offer users a more natural, seamless, and integrated experience. Citing her device as an example, the researcher notes that sensory feedback is a critical differentiator in her innovation. Placing that into the loop makes walking and hand manipulation much easier, creating a big difference in the usability of her devices.
“When a person with a passive prosthesis device holds a spoon, they may not know they have actually made contact. Our newer surgical techniques that restore tactile sensory feedback coupled with advanced prostheses would allow them to sense what their prostheses are contacting, even with their eyes closed.” This surgical technique offers an added layer of sensory feedback. It rewires the nerves and muscles so they can effectively communicate with the prosthetic device and receive information in return.”
Shriya emphasizes that a significant part of research is about failure and overcoming that failure. While inventing a product, there will be moments when we will hit the wall and have to figure out a way to go through or jump over that wall. What’s essential is that we get used to disappointments and not let them deter us. When asked how she handles disappointments, she confesses that she tries not to get emotionally attached to the results and focuses more on the process than the outcome.
It's important to note that in addition to being a researcher and a professor, Shriya is also a trained Bharatnatyam dancer. She founded the Anubhava Dance Company with her dance partner, Joshua George, comprised entirely of first-generation Indian-American professionals in North America. For her, the love for dance equals the passion for research, but recently, she has been able to draw parallels between the two disciplines. She explains how the fields effortlessly intersect: "Many dancers today are not fully aware of the anatomy and physiology of the human body.
Dancing is a high-impact activity and, so when dancers experience wear and tear in their knees, ankles, and hips, they don’t usually know the ‘why’ behind it or how to minimize it. So, recently, I started introducing biomechanics in Bharatnatyam to educate dancers on how to train and cross-train our bodies to minimize injury.
More recently, with the Anubhava Dance Company, we’ve been working on building tools to see if sensory feedback can be an effective tool to help audiences better relate to a complex art form such as Bharatnatyam and comprehend its complexity in addition to the audio and visual streams they already take in at a performance."
For the last several years, Shriya has frequently visited India as part of her Bharatnatyam performances. She has also collaborated with start-ups like Symbionic, which is based out of Chennai, to help develop prostheses and find ways to make them more affordable to people. Sharing her observation of the healthcare landscape in India, she pinpointed the absence of interdisciplinary training and a conducive ecosystem for healthcare innovation and emphasized that, for this to change, India’s educational approach needs to become more interdisciplinary. She works on these initiatives through her nonprofit, the Project Prana Foundation.
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