Question: what was your hardest invention

Faranak Bahrami answered on 14 Mar 2019:

I wouldn’t call it an invention, because to have an invention, something has to be unique in many different ways, and it’s not easy to do that. But I think my Master’s degree project was very difficult. I had 3 months, to come up with a new cough flow meter (loads on the market already but they can be very accurate but very expensive, or affordable but not accurate at all) to measure the lung capacity of people with lung problems (i.e. Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD)) very fast and accurately but it had to be affordable at the same time. So I had to learn so many new things in a very short time, I had to learn the biology side about how the lungs exactly work and what the graphs mean when they cough into the device, I had designed the cough meter, I had to learn Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) which is mostly used in aerospace degrees (I was biomedical engineering, so never had to use it up to then), i had to then manufacture it, I had to test it on myself first, then I testesd it at UCL hospital, may trials… but it ended up being good, and as I know my supervisor managed to make a few modifications and I think it’s coming to the market soon 🙂 which makes me feel great