Meet player one: Dr David Hobbs - Flinders University

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The OrbIT gaming system is the brainchild (and PhD project) of Flinders University biomedical engineer Dr David Hobbs. David pulled together the team of designers, researchers, and clinicians that worked together to create Orby.

Whoever you ask, they’ll tell you that Dr David Hobbs is wonderful. He’s kind and generous. That’s what everyone says. He’s always happy to help the person down the hall. He’s calm and happy even when he was in the crucial stages of writing his PhD thesis. Most remarkably, he’s motivated by an innate drive to help others.

David will joke that his ultimate goal is “a beachfront house in Waikiki.” But really, he genuinely cares about people. He has always been a volunteer. He has always worked in jobs where he can improve the lives of others. His biggest passion is making life better for children with disabilities.

Biomedical engineers are responsible for many medical device innovations, including x-ray machines, robotic limbs, pacemakers, laser surgery and even artificial organs.

Lyn's husband Tolley (R) sets up the audio viusal equipment each week for the Onkaparinga Parkinson's Support Group.

David Hobbs presents to the meeting where members had the opportunity to play with Orby.

Lyn Paunovic and David Hobbs.

“After my first degree in Physics, I knew I was missing a humanistic element. I volunteered at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital to see what medical physics was like but it was the work the doctors were doing that I liked. So, when I learnt about biomedical engineering and later during an internship in Canada that I learnt about rehabilitation engineering that I feel in love with that work. With rehab, you get to work closely with the people you are trying to help and that was something I really liked,” David shares.

David loves working with people. And he can talk to anyone, a skill that has caused the biggest ripple effects. He is just as comfortable talking to a group of clinicians at a medical conference, the reporters at Channel 7, the primary school students at his children’s school or Lyn’s Parkinson’s SA Group.

His colleague and supervisor, Susan Hillier, recalls a speech that they did together to a group of “crusty old engineers.” She took to the stage and outlined the impact Orby would have on children with cerebral palsy and how it could change their lives. It was a speech that pulled at the heartstrings, and it usually got a great response – not this time. The audience was unmoved. Then David got up and cracked open the device. He showed them the insides and spoke to the mechanisms and engineering innovations. He had them crowding around the controller and asking a stream of questions like, “How do you prevent vibration on one side being felt on the other?”

The intersection of engineering and medical innovation

Input from diverse clinicians, researchers and users is what makes Orby so effective. David isn’t competitive or secretive about his research. He’s not clutching his dollars and ideas to himself.

Biomedical engineering is, by its very nature, a collaborative speciality. The origin story sounds like the start of a joke: one day, a doctor sat down to lunch with a mechanical engineer. The doctor talked about the problems they had with people breaking and fracturing their hips, and the mechanical engineer replied, “That’s just a structural issue.” From that conversation, the hip implant was born. It’s a mechanical problem with a mechanical solution, but you’re dealing with the body and our bodies are very good at rejecting foreign materials. As such, you must contend with biomaterials and different coating surfaces to encourage integration.

A biomedical engineer combines physiology, anatomy and health sciences with engineering, science and technology, where the application is always in a medical device or health area. The technology is created to help people. It’s not about the feats of engineering; it’s about the application. It’s about clever problem solving and innovation that has an important, direct outcome for people.

To succeed as a biomedical engineer, you need to be a master of problem-solving and have a mind for curiosity, empathy, risk-taking, and the technical. You need to be the person who sees opportunities.

Flinders University excels in this area championing the Medical Device Partnering Program, which focuses on collaboration between engineers, clinicians and industry. The director, Professor Karen Reynolds, has seen countless projects fall apart because the researchers can’t bring people together. David never had that problem. If David had taken the attitude of “Orby is mine,” he wouldn’t have gone to Susan at UniSA, Lyndsey Collins-Praino at the University of Adelaide, or Ray at the Women’s and Children’s Hospital and said, “Let’s work together.”

Learn more about the team who came together to create Orby.

A 3000-year-old wood and leather prosthetic toe was found on an Egyptian mummy marking one of the first examples of an engineered medical assistive device. Biomedical engineering today is a rapidly growing field, enhanced through technological advances.

05— The team players