Anatomy & Physiology: May 2017

Sunday, May 21, 2017

20 Time Reflection

Reflection:

I chose this project to help myself and others because I personally struggle with drinking enough water daily. I drink water before school and after school, but that hardy adds up to the recommended 7 cups a day. My goal was to design an aesthetic water bottle that would help solve the dehydration epidemic. My initial plan was to first figure out what kinds of functions I could fit into the bottle to make it multifunctional and unique. Then, I would find out what is needed to make those parts and how to integrate it in a way that is ergonomic and practical.

I thought this project went smoothly, no real hiccups or anything. The only obstacle was blogger and trying to find information about the technology I was planning to use. Although information is very accessible today, it was still difficult to find wholesale prices of materials and to understand how things like Bluetooth work. Maybe I just wasn't well versed in the tech language. Otherwise, the project took mostly just brainpower to hash out the details, which wasn't to hard once I got rolling. The water bottle is finished and I will not be continuing it past Anatomy and Physiology. I never really planned to make an actual bottle, but the plan on how to make one is all set and done.

The most concrete thing I learned was a little bit about how Bluetooth works. Besides that, i now know that being an entrepreneur is hard! Perhaps the hardest part of the project was starting it. Everything I thought up of had already existed in some form or another. Even this water bottle project had already been done in many forms, some more advanced than others. I changed my original plan of being super innovative and original to just trying to differentiate my product from other water bottles that supposedly reminded it's user to drink. My research skills improved because of all the extensive searching I had to do in order to differentiate my product. If I did this project again, I would probably shy away from creating products and focus more on a service or self improvement topic. In the end, my bottle ended up being pretty expensive and definitely not accessible to everyone. I would've liked my project to be more relevant and helpful to people all around the world and not just the well-off. I'm probably not going to continue this challenge, simply because the design is basically done and I don't have any plans to actually produce the product. In addition, my bottle is very much a first world product, but I know many people who can't afford the bottle have dehydration problems too.

I would give myself full credit for this project as I met all the deadlines and dedicated a lot of time toward researching. My blogs alone don't show the hours I've spent brainstorming just to be able to write my first blog. Blog posts 3 and 4 better show concrete evidence of my research. I stayed on task during the class time allocated toward 20 Time and I think I did a great job working on and finishing this project. I have already posted pictures of the prototype design I sketched out, so I will link the page here.

TED Talk Outline:

1. why I chose the project
2. give scary facts
3. talk about my process
4. drink water guys.

Thursday, May 11, 2017

Unit 8 Reflection

This unit was primarily about the muscular system, although we started off learning about the synovial joints and movements. There are many types of synovial joint movements, but the main categories are gliding, angular, rotation, and "special" movements, which can only occur at certain joints. The types of joints that allow these motions are planar, hinge, pivot, condyloid, saddle, and ball and socket.

Synovial Joints
http://www.mananatomy.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/synovial_joints_scheme.jpg

Then we moved on to the muscular system, starting with the characteristics of muscles and how they are classified. Muscles serve to move bones, maintain posture, stabilize joints, and generate heat. In order to perform these actions, muscles have to have certain properties, which are contractibility (ability to shorten), extensibility (ability to elongate), and elasticity (ability to recoil). Muscle tissue is made of a different levels of fascia and muscle fibers. There is facia around each muscle fiber, fascia that wraps around bundles of fibers, and facia that surrounds the entire muscle. Each muscle has a side of origin and a side of insertion. The origin side is immovable so the insertion side can move toward the origin when contracting. Each muscle serves multiple roles depending on what type of movement it being made. There are the prime movers that cause the desired action, the antagonist that relaxes in response to the prime mover contracting, the synergists who reduce unnecessary movements, and fixators that stabilize the origin of the prime mover. Muscles are names based on a number of things: direction, size, shape, action, number of origins, and location.

Muscles contract by increasing the area that is overlapped between sarcomeres, which are sections of a myofibril aka thread of muscle fiber. Sarcomeres are composed of two types of protein filaments: actin and myosin. When a muscle is triggered by an electrical impulse, the fibers of each sarcomere slide together, making the muscle shorter. The shortening of a muscle is known as a contraction. We read an article that explained what happens physically to sarcomeres when a muscle is stretched.

Sarcomere
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55831769e4b0e3dcc327b2c3/t/57e5b3eb2994ca98e2ee6e76/1474672050384/Sarcomere

There are three types of muscle twitch fibers that serve different purposes: slow twitch, fast twitch a, and fast twitch b. slow twitch is highly dependent on oxygen and stores little glycogen, but it is also slow to fatigue so it work well for exercises of long duration, like marathons. Fast twitch fibers are more anaerobic and quick to fatigue, to they are better suited for activities that require short bursts of energy. Genetics play the largest role in determining how much of each fiber a person has.

20 Time has been going relatively smoothly; I've learned a lot about other things unrelated to anatomy and physiology. It's a good break to work on 20 Time during class. My new year's goals are being accomplished steadily--I haven't gotten back into a consistent exercise schedule yet but I am exercising more.

Tuesday, May 9, 2017

H2OnTHeGo (post4)

Previously I've said that I couldn't figure out how Bluetooth worked, this time around, I've decided that would be my next project.
Basically, Bluetooth is a technology that allows for the transmission of information between devices over a short distance using radio waves, once device being the "master" and all connecting devices being "slaves". For reference, a master device is often a phone and slaves are things like GPS, radio, ect. A group of synchronized devices is referred to as a piconet, where they all share a frequency hopping pattern determined by the master device. In my case, the bottle cap would be the master and the bracelet would be the slave device.
There's a bunch of technicalities that I don't think anyone would be interested in, but the gist of it is that each device needs to have sensors (usually located on the battery) that can send and receive the signals being sent at the particular frequency the master device sets. In application to my water bottle, sensors will have to be placed on the battery in cap as a strip and on the coin batteries in the silicon bracelet.
As a side thought, it would seem that the bracelet wearer would have to be near the bottle in order for them to remind the user to drink at the same time, so in order for the product to be practical the two parts of the bottle should run more separately than dependently.

Setbacks were minimal this time because information is so widely available over the internet! Yay! Although the tests were sometimes hard to read because of all the tech-y terms that I did not know. The terms were easy to search up though, so that was fine.
Looks like the project is coming to a close. Thanks for reading :)

Information from:
https://www.bluetooth.com/what-is-bluetooth-technology/how-it-works
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/experts-how-does-bluetooth-work/

Sunday, May 7, 2017

What Happen's When You Stretch

Relate and Review:

As we've learned in our notes before, muscle fibers are made of myofibrils, which are in turn constructed of multiple sarcomeres. Each sarcomere has over lapping parts with one another. When a muscle contracts, the area that overlaps increases, essentially shortening the muscle. The reading talks about the counter of that, which is when the muscle is being stretched, muscle fibers are pulled to its full length and disorganized fibers are realigned. Proprioreceptors in the muscle (the primary ones being the stretch receptors) relay messages to the nervous system that triggers the stretch reflex, which is the muscles initial resistance to stretching. However, If you hold a stretch long enough, the proprioreceptors will start to decrease its signaling, which allows the muscles to slowly lengthen. Another cause for relaxation is when tension due to contraction exceeds a certain threshold and causes a lengthening reaction. A lengthening reaction is when a muscle is inhibited from contracting, therefore forcing a relaxation. In the muscle unit, we learned about how often muscles are paired together so that when one contracts, the other has to relax (ie. biceps and triceps). This is called reciprocal inhibition--when the bicep contracts, the triceps are inhibited from contracting.

Quotes:

"This realignment [when you stretch] is what rehabilitates scarred tissue back to health" (1). So then if you get a large cut, is it important to stretch it to prevent or reduce scarring? I think people would be interested to learn about how to not scar.
"The muscle spindle contains two different types of fibers which are sensitive to change in muscle length and the rate of change in muscle length" (2). It never ceases to amaze me how cells can record such minute things. The rate in which a muscle is lengthening? That's amazing.
"In [a sit up] the back muscles also contract [in addition to the stomach muscles]" (3). That's pretty counter intuitive and a little hard to picture, but it really shows how the body is way more complex than an average person will ever know. Learning about how muscles cooperate could really make exercising more efficient.

No More Runner's Knee!

For this project, I attempted to redesign the knee joint, which is formed by the femur and patella, in order to prevent runner's knee, or patellofemoral pain syndrome, caused by the wearing down or disalignment of the kneecap. In order for me to know what part of the joint to redesign, I started the project off with perusing the internet for information about how and why runner's knee occurs. Once I found sufficient information, I brainstormed ways to protect the kneecap or keep it in place so that pain can be reduced or prevented.

The joint I am redesigning is the patella, which lies between the femur bone and the tibia. The bottom of the patella is attached to the tibia (shinbone) by the patellar tendon (which is actually a ligament) and to the quadriceps by the quadriceps tendon from the top ("Patellar Tendon Tear"). The quadriceps and tendons work together to straighten the knee as well as support any other movements made by the leg. One of the common reasons why runner's knee occurs is because the muscles around it are not strong enough to support the kneecap. Quadriceps and hamstrings are important for lessening the pressure on the knee and for keeping the kneecap in place ("Runner's Knee"). There is a specific groove on the femur where the kneecap is supposed to slide, so as you can imagine, if the knee cap moves out of alignment, both the cartilage on the femur and tibia can be damaged by the rubbing together of bones ("Patella"). Patellofemoral pain syndrome occurs when the patella rubs on the femur underneath it and leads to other problems. When the cartilage wears out, the shock absorption abilities of the knee decreases, furthering the degradation of the patella and surrounding bones ("Runner's Knee"). However, the damage done to the cartilage on the femur is not what actually causes pain--there are no nerves or blood vessels being damaged there. What causes the pain is what follows as a result of damaged cartilage or excessive stress on the knee the bone underneath and surrounding soft tissue can be damaged ("Patellofemoral Pain Syndrome").

The reason this syndrome is nicknamed runner's knee is because the repetitive running motion naturally causes the motions that the condition often stems from: more friction in the knee area, tightening of hamstring and calf muscles, disalignment of kneecap, ect. Of course non-runners can feel the symptoms of patellofemoral pain syndrome too if they lack proper exercise or suffer from biomechanical problems of their bones, so everyone should be aware of this problem.

brown-bone, tan-cartilage/tendons,
blue-bursae, red-muscle

increased cartilage, increased bursae size,
modified femoral groove not shown

If the joint could be redesigned, to keep the kneecap in track, I would deepen the femoral groove so that there would be less wriggle room and perhaps increase the synovial fluid around the knee to reduce friction and rubbing together of bones. The size of the bursae can't increase too much though because inflammation of the synovial membrane causes another problem, synovitis, that is also painful (Biel). I would also make the cartilage on the femur and patella thicker and cover a larger area so that there is more cartilage to go through and more shock could be absorbed.

I came up with this design after contemplating how to prevent the patella from dislocating and how to lessen the inevitable wear-and-tear of bones. Since, to some degree, bones cannot be entirely protected from wearing down, the best solution would be to make the joint slide as smoothly as possible to make the bones last as long as possible, hence increasing the amount of lubrication. Increasing the size of the bursae that holds synovial fluid helps with this. Increasing the thickness of cartilage also helps prolong the life of the bone by giving more cushion before the patella impacts the femur underneath it. The added coverage of cartilage decreases the chance that the patella will rub on the femur as well because if the patella is dislocated, at least the dislocation may still place the kneecap on the part of the femur that has cartilage.

However, the anatomy of the bone is the way it is now because evolution has found that it works, so it would be no surprise if my redesign of the joint ran into some problems. As I mentioned before, the inflammation of the synovial membrane causes a painful condition called synovitis (Biel). I would expect increasing bursae size to increase lubrication would create similar effects as the inflammation of synovial membrane might. In addition, extra cartilage thickness might result in too much cushion and make the knee less stable because cartilage is softer and squishier than the spongy bone or compact bone that lies underneath.

To prevent runner's knee realistically with what we have now, strengthening and stretching the hamstring, calf, and quadriceps muscles will help provide needed support to the patella. If you already have runner's knee, it is important to avoid downhill slopes and other knee bending activities to alleviate stress until the knee is properly healed ("Runner's Knee").

This assignment was pretty cool because it really brought together all the information we've been learning for the past month about joints, bones, and muscles. We were also forced to think beyond just facts in order to redesign the joint and use information to work with our creativity, so I thought this project was a nice close to this unit.

Works Cited
Biel, Andrew. Trail Guide to the Body: How to Locate Muscles, Bones and More. Boulder, Colo: of Discovery, 2008. Print.

"Patella." Healthline. Ed. Healthline Medical Team. Healthline Media, 07 Apr. 2015. Web. 07 May 2017.

"Patellar Tendon Tear." OrthoInfo. American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, 01 Feb. 2016. Web. 07 May 2017.

"Patellofemoral Pain Syndrome." Sports Injury Clinic. Virtual Sports Injury Clinic, n.d. Web. 07 May 2017.

"Runner's Knee." Runner's World. Runner's World, n.d. Web. 07 May 2017.

Wednesday, May 3, 2017

Chicken Dissection Analysis

In this lab, we explored the major muscles of a chicken through dissection in place of an actual human body. Starting with the main body and ending with limbs, we sliced and peeled away skin and identified muscles as they were uncovered. We could feel the contraction and relaxation of the muscles when you flexed or extended the wing. Muscles are the ones that perform an action, where as the bone they are attached to give structure to the body and hold the muscles in place. Tendons attached muscles to bones. For example, the biceps and triceps are attached to the humerus bone by tendons. The biceps flex to bring the lower arm as the triceps relax. Usually, a muscles has an end that does the contracting and an end that doesn't move. Tendons of the origin of a muscle fixes the muscle to the bone on the side that does not move, while tendons of insertion move as the muscle moves (aka the side that contracts). While chickens and humans share many of the same muscles, like deltoids and quadriceps, the muscles of a chicken have been altered to maximize the parts that humans like to eat. Chicken breasts are proportionally much larger than that of a human as are their leg muscles like the gastrocnemius.