It was the film Iron Man that set Dr Ishara Dharmasena on the path to Loughborough University. Watching the movie as a child in Sri Lanka, he was blown away by the “cool stuff” the superhero could do with his outfit and that planted a seed in his mind as he grew up on the island, which has a rich textile industry.
“Textiles have been in my blood from the beginning,” says the Royal Academy of Engineering research fellow and senior lecturer at the university’s Wolfson school of mechanical, electrical and manufacturing engineering. “I began to research how to integrate textiles with nanotechnology to make advanced wearables which can solve rehabilitation problems. Basically, I married these two paths.”
The results of that marriage are the breakthroughs he’s making at Loughborough University, an institution renowned for its world-leading sport and health related research.
In 2021, Dharmasena was awarded a prestigious research fellowship to work on super-smart, wearable textiles for health monitoring. These self-powered textiles – which generate energy from body motion – incorporate sensors and electronics to track a patient’s movement and other health indicators, such as heart rate and breathing.
This technology is paving the way for “bionic bandages”, T-shirts and trousers that can monitor how a patient is progressing. The information is designed to be transmitted to health professionals who can then decide if changes are needed to a rehab programme without the patient leaving home. “The bandages and clothing are similar to regular clothing, and they can remain in the background while you’re moving on with your regular day-to-day activities and still keep track of what you’re doing,” says Dharmasena.
This could be a gamechanger, he adds, giving many more people access to rehabilitation treatment. “Currently, about 50% of global rehabilitation needs, especially in developing countries, aren’t met because many countries don’t have infrastructure or enough doctors to treat people or care for them. Even in the UK, there are huge queues for NHS rehabilitation services.
“So, it’s a big problem, but the ability to monitor remotely is a key solution because doctors can [look after] a lot of patients, everything becomes streamlined, and a combination of doctors may be able to treat a patient.”
Dharmasena’s work was recognised when he was selected as one of five winners of the 2024 Young Engineer of the Year award from the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Engineers Trust. He was described as “a world-leading theorist in the field of nanogenerators” whose work has been pivotal in bringing them into “a practical state”. “Currently, I am leading the SuS-Tex research cluster at Loughborough University, consisting of seven PhD students,” he says. “I’m mentoring them and, supported by seven other academic colleagues, we are collaboratively developing this technology further.”
Collaboration is central to the culture at Loughborough. The university is home to the National Centre for Sport and Exercise Medicine and its school of sport, exercise and health sciences alone has more than 60 experts who collaborate across injury prevention, rehabilitation, exercise for patient recovery, strength and conditioning, prehabilitation for surgery, and wearable technology for behaviour change. Its collaborative ethos led Dharmasena to team up with Dr Jakob Škarabot, another expert in rehabilitation.
Škarabot, a senior lecturer in neuromuscular physiology at the school of sport, exercise and health sciences, focuses on how the brain talks to muscles. When someone has an injury, they may lose their ability to control the muscles effectively, or they might lose control of a limb completely. Škarabot is working to understand how neural signals determine muscle actions. By placing sensors on muscles that control limbs, scientists can use computer algorithms to identify the messages that the brain and spinal cord send to those muscles when a person wants to move.
They can then use the messages in the rehabilitation process to restore the function of the limb much faster. It’s hoped that Škarabot’s research will advance understanding of movement impairment and so aid rehabilitation.
“Loughborough’s Midlands campus is large, but self-contained,” he says. “The ecosystem is really conducive to collaboration and integrates elite sport, world-class engineering, and the National Centre for Sport and Exercise Medicine to name a few. It’s easier to collaborate because everyone’s in the same place – and there’s buy-in from everyone about accelerating collaborative research and translating cutting-edge solutions into practice.”
That proximity helped him collaborate with Dharmasena, and they have recently submitted a joint grant application. “This is an example of the ecosystem in practice, where people from quite distinct backgrounds find common ground,” says Škarabot. “In our case, it’s developing advances for rehabilitation, but we’re approaching from very different angles. And this could lead to something that’s entirely novel, because when you put people from different perspectives together, that usually results in something that nobody else has thought of.”
Škarabot appreciates Loughborough’s “academic freedom and independence. I really enjoy the freedom to explore and stretch myself and get into areas that might not have been mine initially.”
In a separate area of rehabilitation research, Prof Mark Lewis and Dr Andrew Capel, also at the school of sport, exercise and health sciences, are investigating how muscle damaged during physical activity can be effectively repaired.
They have been working on lab-grown tissue to enable them to monitor how it responds to a gym regime, or how certain drugs affect the tissue’s behaviour.
For Lewis, a professor of musculoskeletal biology, working with lab-grown tissue brings him a degree of control he could only have dreamed of until recently. “The tissues are completely compliant to your requirements,” he says. “You can make them in your own image. You can make them in any image. You can tell them to exercise for 15 minutes a day, and they will do exactly that, no more, no less. So, you can really target a specific therapy and see the effects on the tissue.”
This could open up exciting possibilities for personalised rehabilitation and the development of new clinical interventions, with the outputs tailored to each individual, allowing them to regain and maintain health.
Capel, a senior lecturer in bioengineering and regenerative sciences, sees Loughborough as “a real hub for exercise, medicine, rehabilitation, health and wellbeing”. He is Loughborough’s lead on the Emerge project – East Midlands Emerging RehabTech Growth Enterprise – which is positioning the East Midlands as the UK’s RehabTech Valley, a leading hub for rehabilitation technologies excellence.
“The East Midlands has established a reputation as the national leader in rehabilitation science, with an ambition to become a global beacon of excellence,” says Capel. The project will “bring together hundreds of MedTech SMEs, patients, rehabilitation practitioners and academics to develop the next wave of pioneering rehabilitation technologies”.
Find out more about research in sport, health and wellbeing at Loughborough University – and why it’s a gamechanger
