Episode 2: Lin Jiang

[Music]

Vincent del Casino: Hi there, and welcome to the Accidental Geographer. My name is Vincent del Casino, and I'm the Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs here at San Jose State University and the host of this podcast. Today, we're gonna have an amazing conversation with Dr. Lin Chiang. We're gonna cover topics from human-robot relations to the ways in which mechanical engineers can think through problems related to the body. So come on board, it's gonna be a fantastic discussion. Well, thanks so much for being here. I really appreciate you taking the time. Thank you. So I always love to start with trying to figure out how people ended up kind of intellectually where they wanted to be. So for you, you jumped into aerospace engineering as an undergraduate. What attracted you to that field? What made you interested in the questions that were being asked in aerospace engineering?

Lin Jiang: So I started my study in aerospace engineering, and then I had an accident in my senior year. So I have to do a surgery, back surgery, and then at that time, the technology was not good enough in my country to allow me to do like a robotic surgery. So I had suffered like half a year on that accident, and then decided to go for a large surgery. Recovered pretty well. But then I started to think as an engineer, how can we make some changes to the technologies, especially for those for the public health.

Vincent del Casino: That's really interesting and so that got you, so you started with aerospace but then you started to move towards control engineering and mechanical engineering and so forth in order to kind of address like these fundamental challenges that came from your own personal experience.

Lin Jiang: Yes, that's my personal experience. So I, one, I'm really interested into the image guided surgery at that time. So, I started my control engineering degree and I want to know how to control like a robot. And then I started to looking for like a PhD degree and then getting to higher education. At that time, I had another story actually changed my journey again. I had a baby in my last year of my master's test. So I had a tough time when breastfeed a baby. And I looked for some schools, but accidentally I see a project that is an NSF project and studying the breastfeed mechanism from a fluid engineering perspective. So then I said, I have to be on that project. I told myself, and then I started applying for that project and then get accepted by my advisor. And then I started my research in the biomechanics of engineering.

Vincent del Casino: That's really interesting. And that's what brought you to Texas and to the United States from China where you had studied prior. What were you thinking? Like, all right, you know, I'm going to pick up, I'm gonna, this is a passion. It's really awesome that you found that area and someone doing the work that you were interested in and clearly you've been guided by like your personal experience to what projects make sense for you. But that's a kind of a big jump. How was that? I mean, from a transition perspective and things like that.

Lin Jiang: Yeah, I think I prepared myself pretty well with all the STEM skillsets in my undergraduate. So that transition to kind of robotics does not make me suffer too much for me. However, I transitioned to the fluid engineering and then also studied different subjects versus the aerospace engineering. That has some contact that is pretty kind of common, but also have a challenging part. Like I never understand heat transfer. I never understood the tissue engineering. So I have to study new content. And then I told myself, that's where the path I ended up with. And I wanted to study hard and then train myself to be a good mechanical engineer and be able to work in an interdisciplinary area like biomedical engineering field.

Vincent del Casino: That's really interesting. And University of Texas Dallas had what you wanted. So you ended up in a whole new country, in a new place, in a hole new field.

Lin Jiang: Yes, so what I had in my graduate study at the University of Texas Dallas, we also collaborate with a medical center. It's a UT Southwest Medical Center. And when I started talk to physicians and surgeons at the UT Southwest, we started to see that a gap between engineer and the physicians or medical science. So we cannot understand each other's languages. And that's when I start to tell myself that we need to find a bridge that both of us can understand our needs and find our clinical needs and then see how we, as an engineer, we can help those clinical needs. So that's why I continue in my study, even after graduate, when I started my academic position, I continue my research in the field of biomedical engineering.

Vincent del Casino: That's really interesting. So what you're suggesting, which I think is really powerful and especially really important here is that people sometimes think of engineering like, oh, I do this kind of engineering, but you're saying this is an interdisciplinary set of questions. You've got to talk across not just fields in engineering, but potentially people in health and human sciences, in the medical sciences and so forth. And have you been able to build those bridges and collaborations then throughout your time here at San Jose?

Lin Jiang: Yes, throughout my time here, I've been talking to different group of expertise. One big collaboration is I made with Santa Clara Valley Medical Center. It's a public medical center and also at the same county with the San Jose State, it's a perfect match for my study. So I started my research in breastfeeding biomechanics. And then at my time at San Jose, I started to looking into infant feeding. Yeah, I wanted to see how we can help with neonatal, especially those with preterm cleft palate, infants who has difficulties in taking the nutrition. So I started this collaboration with NICU at Valley Medical, talked with Dr. Song. And she is also interested in looking at engineering solutions. And there are something that as a mother, we both understand that when we feed a baby, we know where the challenges are. There are also something that I don't understand because I'm not a doctor and I don't oversee those preterm babies in the NICU. And then as I move on with my research, I develop some prototype that be able to help infants to do the nutritive suckling, practice on the suckling skills. And also I develop a prototype, for example, the homogenizer for human milk. So mothers would get the donated human milk from Human Milk Bank, and then get homogenized with our device so that we can feed the baby with more consistent milk fat and calories.

Vincent del Casino: Wow, I've never heard of that at all. That is absolutely.

Lin Jiang: That's something actually new actually what they're undergoing right now and then also another thing is that we want to know where we can get the baby prepared for next stage. So the premature babies they came out with all the tubes and then all the vital checks with on themselves in incubator and then but they're they have been built pretty much when they were born they already have all the neurologically readiness. For everything, because they are a complete personnel. And then what I'm doing here is to get them prepared. When they are out of hospital, they know what they need to do. They want to survive. They were taken nutrition, they were breastfeed, they were bottle feed, they're ready to go.

Vincent del Casino: That's really interesting. So tell me a little bit more about how robotics and even telorobotic systems play into this. I mean, obviously we're here in the heart of Silicon Valley. You know, the movement towards artificially intelligent systems and robots and robotics is playing a big role in society today and a really big role in health.

Lin Jiang: So robotics traditionally people think about in the industrial manufacturing and then there are some like heavy duty jobs that we want the robots to carry. So in a current era, especially after post pandemic, in the post pandemic era, the tele robotics plays a vital role in terms of not only in the manufacturing but becomes more vital in the medical science field. So there are some areas that they have limited resources in terms of like surgical robot. So teleoperation of the surgical robot is important because we don't get the technician to be able to train on the surgical robots in the rural area. For example, even they have a robot arm, they don't know how to operate it. So what I'm developing with my group right now is to. Create a virtual reality or mixed reality platform. So we can have a remote trained doctor to operate on a surgical robot, which is the same type that a remote space would have. So the doctor would be able to help the operation on site. It can be applied to many different areas. It could be applied to some areas that doesn't have a technician, or it could be used on like space. So for astronauts that's in the space, if they need help, then there is a robot arm there. We can control that robot arm from the remote distance. And then in terms of our current technology, we want to keep these security, network security for the operation. We also wanted to make sure that it's safe because it's penetrating the tissue. And then also we wanted to give the physician. Fidelity feedback of what they are experiencing.

Vincent del Casino: Can you explain a little bit more about what you mean by fidelity in this concept?

Lin Jiang: For example, currently the surgical robots focus more on the soft tissue, but soft tissue have different stiffness. So tumor has one stiffness and then different stage of the tumor has different stiffness, so what our group is developing is giving them a feeling of the touch of a different stiffness tissue when they are operating a robot, kind of tele-controlled.

Vincent del Casino: That is unbelievable, because without that, you might not understand. So you have to, in real time, have the robot connect or touch tissue, then send that back. Come up with a way that someone would understand that from the feel, the haptics, the connection of the hands or something.

Lin Jiang: So it's a field of touch or haptic as you mentioned, that we wanted to have the operator or we call it a master side to understand that the field of the touch. So it could better help with the remote side.

Vincent del Casino: That's amazing. So, I'm just floored right now. I mean, it's so interesting and I've, I don't know if you know, I've been writing about robotics and robotic systems and I'm a health geographer by training and I have done some thinking about this, but I've never done it to the depth that you're working on now. So the other side of that is also now the ways in which wearables and other robotic systems are being integrated into healthcare and I think you're work on some of that as well.

Lin Jiang: Yes, so that part in a bigger picture, it will be human-robot interaction. So the wearables that we developed, there are exoskeletons, they are wearable, upper limb wearable or they are, wearable gloves that we develop is more of like a sensing technology for these human activity, similar to the watch that we were like the watch of that has sensors that we will have. The Alexa ring that it's going to detect our sleep quality, similar to those wearables. And what's nice about wearables is it collects biometric data and we send it to server and then analyze it for these particular human being. And then we can use that data to kind of analyze it and then to suggest other things. Human-robot interaction is a big part. Actually, what I'm working on it right now is for the Hospital environment. That's another collaboration that I'm making with a Valley Medical. So the idea is that if everyone is having their kind of consistent wearable device with them or with their or have a phone or have watch or have something wearable with them and now we centralize all the data then we were able to centralize the data and then we will able to understand what their needs are. So for example, in the hospital, if I'm walking in and I wanted to see a department, a physician, and I don't have to kind of make appointment ahead of time, my vital is going to send the data to my physician already and the appointment already pre-made for me. And then I walk in, I just go to where I wanted to be. Save time and energy and then save a lot of personnel in many different aspects.

Vincent del Casino: Yeah, it's really interesting. It changes our relationship to health, too, when all of a sudden it's extended and you're connected to it. There's an entire anthropology to that and all kinds of things. I could see some really interesting connections there. And it emphasizes even more the data privacy questions and our need for higher level encryption and why we want quantum computing and other things like that. So we can really lock down data because yeah, your whole health experience is all of a sudden being passed along through these systems.

Lin Jiang: So for that, I also, like you mentioned before, because of the interdisciplinary nature of that project, I also work with social scientists and psychology, and all these professors at San Jose State. We were thinking about how the technology impact and social impact for the public health, and then what are we going to get considering the human aspects, human factors, In terms of design, the wearables, we should consider those human factors, because eventually that will be used by everyone.

Vincent del Casino: Yeah. No, it's really interesting. And we have this very large significant human factors program with NASA, right? And we've run a very large program out of psychology. So it's really fantastic that you're working on that. So some of the other things you do, well, I want to, I have so many questions now I can't even begin to kind of, I want to go back for a second because I want talk a little bit about some of actual prototyping you've done, some of the work you've done to study. And the one on creating an actual smart breast pump obviously came from, you said, your own personal experience, but what's the technology you're bringing there and what were you trying to really solve with this new technology and how is it going? Have you advanced that work in any way and what does it look like?

Lin Jiang: Yeah, yeah. So the smart breast pump is the first thing that I started prototyping after I joined San Jose State. So from my previous study, including the clinical preliminary work, I found that 99% of mothers suffered from the breast pump, commercial breast pumps. So including myself, and I studied the kind of the mechanism of the commercial breast pump. I also studied the mechanism of infant feed. Comparing them, I feel I saw the data that's really different. So the commercial breast pump created four times the larger vacuum than an infant would create. So mothers have no choice. So they can only buy something off the shelf. And that's the only option they have. And for the good of a baby's nutrition, we sacrifice the comfort. So what I'm doing here, at San Jose State, I developed a smart lactate breast pump. I give it a name because it's more of a better lactation. And the idea is that I'm doing the AI pumping and I wanted to switch the pressure between the preferral, like the compression pressure and then the vacuum pressure. So in the old days, when there's no breast pump, mothers would do hand massage and then hand pump. So basically manually. Squeeze the milk for their baby and why can we do it together with the vacuum pump we have. So what the technologies that we have on our smart lactate breast pump is we incorporate artificial muscle on the pump and then they are going to massage the middle or smaller breast ducts and then make them merge to larger breast ducts so they will be able to deliver breast milk easier than vacuum only.

Vincent del Casino: Without the pain and discomfort that many women go through when they're using that more traditional pump. Exactly. And so, which is fascinating. So you're trying to, as best as you can, reproduce the more natural experience that came from doing this physically back in the day.

Lin Jiang: So the natural way of an infant blood feeding is the infant is going to wrap around the mother's breast and then use their tongue and the cheek muscle to be able to massage the areola area. So more milk would come to the major ducts similar to our invention. So we're mimicking what the infant would do during breastfeed. So then the pumping experience would be much more comfort.

Vincent del Casino: It is the smart component, it responds to individual experiences, so it can adapt in a way to each individual mother because everyone has a unique biology to a certain extent.

Lin Jiang: Yes, everyone has a different tissue property, pretty much. And then they are pain resistant is different. So the smart part would be the AI pumping. And there is a button that we can enable for AI pumping, so you can import your experience level and then train the device. So the device would know, I'm not we exceed that vacuum level. Where at the same time I distribute the pressure for the compression level. So then the mothers would have their personalized breast.

Vincent del Casino: That's really interesting. So you have a patent pending on this, or is it?

Lin Jiang: Already a patent already published last year 2024 yeah and we already received several companies who are interested in collaboration or kind of licensing the patent and then also there are some physicians who are interesting in collaborating with me because there are it's a big market for infant feeding and for the breastfeeding and it's an issue that has been but um commercial pumps that don't try to solve it because it's not cost effective. But the problem exists and physicians or engineers are still looking for solutions.

Vincent del Casino: Do you think it's something that we could actually make cost effective with the technology that you've been developing?

Lin Jiang: Yes, that's the reason that the patent is out for. So the artificial muscle that we developed is very cheap and cost effective. And then also we made it modular. So it could be like attachment, like something like a heat pad that can sell off the shelf and then people can bring it and then just attach to regular breast pumps.

Vincent del Casino: Oh, so it's adaptive, so you don't even need a whole other machine.

Lin Jiang: We don't need the whole machine we just connect it to whatever pump they already have and adjust the pressure from there

Vincent del Casino: awesome. That is really fantastic. So interesting. And you've applied some of this, similar to some of the other medical device things you're thinking about right now. How else are you thinking through these smart technology? And obviously, you're relying on to a certain extent, our advances in software development, not just hardware development, right? I don't know if they're artificially intelligent or if they are just really amazingly fast algorithms, but how are these things all come together for you?

Lin Jiang: So we have a machine learning model that our group developed, and then we use it for our artificial intelligence control or AI control. So it's more like a reinforcement learning, and then, we call it a human intention prediction. So we wanted to predict what the human want. Very typical use is on mostly exoskeleton robotics, when people walk, step, or sit, from standing to sit, sitting to standing. Those different gestures will create a different biosignals. And then we learn from those signals what are the current status and be able to support through the exoskeleton control. We use a similar idea for our artificial muscles because they are just like nonlinear robots. They are like octopus shape robot and because they're soft robotics. And so what we are getting is feedback from either mother's breast pressure or the infant's oral feeding pressure. So from those pressure, we will tell the device what the infant muscle activity is or what the mother's breasts is experiencing. And then we're going to calculate optimized value to be able to support mothers or infant as much as we can.

Vincent del Casino: That's really interesting. And so I know you've published widely on this work as well. I imagine people have come to you now to do more collaboration as a result of the publication of your research also.

Lin Jiang: Yeah, yeah. So they published a work including both clinical study and the experimental study. So there are a lot of collaboration reach out from Kentucky, Illinois and then also New York. They wanted to work with me. So mostly are physicians and then they have something in their idea but they don't know how to engineering it. And then they still saw the patent that I made for a smart lactate breast pump. They saw my paper and then they wanted to reach out. They reach out through the Office of Research and Innovation and they want to ask me how we can develop a device that will work in a.

Vincent del Casino: That's really amazing. So how are students integrated into all of this? I imagine you have a working lab, you have classes that you teach, probably at the graduate and undergraduate level. How do students start to pick up on what you're doing and get involved?

Lin Jiang: Yeah, so I have a lot of students in the lab, and so for advertising what I do, I usually do it in my classes. I teach mostly mechatronics, robotics classes, and then they are all like a project involved in those classes. So I will reach out to students and then give them my project ideas. So the students would come to the lab and work with me on different projects. And the graduate courses, I also teach robot control modeling. And then the graduate students also work with me on their master projects or thesis. So that's where I have a lot of students sign up for different projects. And the working mode is I stay in the lab, most like to live in a lab, a lot. And then I work with my students, kind of jumping back and forth from one project to another project. And then looking at their progress. And we do have a lot of try and errors in our lab because engineering is try and error, eventually. We fail many times and we also try different methods, but we all have one goal and an objective for each of the project. So even we fail, we don't give up and then we will continue. We had that passion in this route. So I'm lucky that many students interested in my project, and I also recruit the freshmen students because I wanted to have the students to have a longer experience with the hands-on experience in my lab. And then I train them from scratch and they learn pretty well. They are like a mini PhDs after four years or five years at San Jose State. So I have a lot of students starting working with me in their freshman year and stay in the lab. For four years, I've been there four years and then the first batch of students is going to graduate. Awesome. And he already admitted as a master student in San Jose State. So potentially see him in the next two years as well. That's great. Yeah, but that's a really good accomplishment. That's why I wanted to stay in academia. The reason is first I can do what I'm passionate about. I get the freedom to create those different type medical devices. And I can do the research in the human-robot interaction. And I have a lot of ideas that I want to realize it and I have students to help me. I have colleagues, collaborators and a very good environment, like interdisciplinary collaborations that I can make here. And also to see students success, graduate, get a really good job in the Bay Area, stepping into like R&D in the robotics fields. Makes me feel most accomplished.

Vincent del Casino: What I love, too, about what you're saying about the classroom is that failure is a part of what this is about. It is, you're not gonna get it right all the time. And too often, higher education is focused on, oh, you have to have the answer. But the answer often comes through mistakes or trial and error and these kind of things. And some students think, oh, I can just become an inventor. Well, yeah, but there's a lot of broken. Pipes and other things that happen and as a, before you get to that place.

Lin Jiang: Yes, exactly. So I personally I failed many times in my grad school and from classes, some classes I'm not good at. I spend a lot of time studying and I find a peer to help me in my classes and then I find myself kind of succeed at the end of the semester. So I think the never give up is one motor that I always believe in myself. Even like in the exams, I never give up until the very last minute. I know I can make it. And I tell my student a lot, let's say same thing. And then sometimes student frustrated and then come back to me and say, I don't think this is going to work. And I think, and I told him or her, I said, let sit down and let's work through and see what's going on and what's wrong with this step or that step and see if we can try one more time. Then if it doesn't work Let's switch a method and then try again.

Vincent del Casino: Yeah, that's amazing. So as you think about the next stages, the next thing, what sorts of projects are really exciting you? Obviously you're continuing this work, but I imagine new problems are coming up, new things, new experiences. You know, what do you look at and go, oh, this is the next think for me, and maybe even in your field, what are the next things in your feel?

Lin Jiang: Yeah, so actually one gap that I find in my study, in my work, is that I can do physical therapy devices for infants, for example, in training their muscles to get ready for suckling. However, they are not ready to swallow. So I don't know at what point this infant is ready to get the fluid and swallow. So they are not like a naturally born infant at the full term. The premature babies they get all the knowledges building their brain, but their brain is not ready to tell them to get the motor skills to work. So that's the one gap I found after talking with different discipling expertise. So the next step I'm doing is to understand the neurological behavior and then how that develop over time for the infants. So I'm actually starting to look into their brain activation. And then we have a collaboration with Valley Medical. They purchased the headset that would use the near-infrared to enlighten the brain activity. So we will see when the baby is ready. It's similar to the idea, like I'm going to ask a six-month infant to walk. That's impossible. But I know that 16 months. This infant is ready. But that point, that time point is something we want to explore. So we can get the infant trained and get the well ready at that point so we can discharge this infant from hospital and then we know that from now on, I'm not going to worry about their nutritive feeding.

Vincent del Casino: That's really interesting. I mean, neuroscience and neurobiology are very big, rapidly expanding fields. And you would think after a long time with people studying this stuff, and every day we're met with new problems and challenges. So it sounds like you're gonna be pretty busy for a while.

Lin Jiang: Uh, I don't know until when, but, uh, forever. Through retirement. Even after retirement, I think.

Vincent del Casino: After retirement. It's a lifelong project. For sure. Well, I want to thank you so much for being here today, for sharing your work, and for your commitment to the projects, to our students, to our community, and just the genuine way in which you engage in collaboration across the institution, across the country now, and the Valley. So thank you, so much, for being here.

Lin Jiang: Thank you for your time, thank you for inviting me.

Vincent del Casino: Yeah, it's been absolutely wonderful.

Lin Jiang: Thank you!