Song of Success: Biomedical Engineering Capstone Harmonizes Music, Physical Therapy

Music accentuates life's greatest achievements, bringing people together and motivating listeners to hold their heads a little higher. Its healing and unifying properties became central tenets for 2026 Rose-Hulman biomedical engineering graduates Narindwa Semakula, Allison Kirk, and Columba Rodriguez Real and their capstone project for a former Rose-Hulman student with a traumatic brain injury. Their design helps him accomplish his physical therapy goals to the tune of his favorite music.

Dubbing themselves the "Songbirds," the team created an instrument to help monitor their client's head and neck posture, a beautiful symphony of systems intertwining together in harmony. The device features a sensor and an Arduino microcontroller, clipped to the brim of a hat, that send data about their relative angling and positioning to an app on the client's iPad via the Internet of Things.

After reading the data, the app signals the client's playlists via Pushcut and Apple Shortcuts, increasing or decreasing the volume of the client's music based on whether the posture goal was met. The app also graphs the data and contains a dashboard for adjusting the posture goal or the time target, which the team customized with large widgets to make it easier for the client to use.

"We didn't want it to cause any disruptions, so we had to make sure it could go along with everything that he was doing," said Semakula, noting that their design was chosen for its portability and wireless connectivity.

"How can we make this easier for the different stakeholders that surround this project?" Rodriguez Real added.

Observing their client's keenness for caps, the team also designed the device to be easily transferred between a variety of hats, allowing him to choose the accessory that fits his mood.

"The most important part is it's human-centered design," said Kirk. "We're impacting someone, and it's about understanding that person, and that's what leads the whole design."

The mechanics of the device are also catered to the client's interests.

"In his studies at Rose, [the client] was doing music biofeedback research, which was very interesting because that's exactly what this project was," Kirk explained. "Understanding how this works is something that excites him."

That excitement was a key motivation for Semakula, Kirk, and Rodriguez Real, who deliberately selected a project and design outside of their comfort zone to gain new experience. As part of the biomedical engineering design capstone, each student also selects a self-directed learning objective: a skill outside of the core curriculum that they commit to learn for the betterment of themselves and their project.

Semakula taught herself the programming language C to work with the Arduino, and Rodriguez Real focused on the Internet of Things and getting their devices to "communicate" with one another. Kirk chose ANSYS, running stress simulations to understand how the device might impact the mobility of the client's neck.

"As a biomedical engineer, you need a very introspective perspective on the different sciences and how they connect. This project was an important example of it…connecting the behavioral psychology and neuroscience and biomedical engineering," said Kirk. "The neck affects all the other components — swallowing, eating. That affects a lot of his daily life."

For all three students, the project required them to learn and perform a medley of skills. Much like a skilled musician playing a new tune for the first time, the teammates relied on their existing knowledge and expertise to expand their horizons, collaborating with faculty from the Computer Science & Software Engineering department.

"The project we did wasn't anything we learned in the curriculum," Rodriguez Real explained. "In the curriculum, we learn how to figure out when things don't work. Those are the skills that helped us out."

Their rewards for achieving their goals were remarkably similar to their client's rewards for meeting his. While they were testing the device, the device played, "Flowers" by Miley Cyrus to signal a successful test. The next few moments were always filled with cheers, hugs, and of course, lyrics.

"Thinking back to 17-year-old me, I would have been scared of a project like this because it doesn't have any direction," said Semakula. "Being able to look back on this project and see all the milestones that we were able to get through because we learned stuff we didn't know…has been really rewarding."

The team will continue to earn their flowers as they step into their careers. Semakula plans to pursue a master's degree in biomedical and clinical engineering at the University of Connecticut, and Kirk will attend graduate school at University of Michigan for neuro-engineering research. After completing an internship with Modineer Group this summer and her master's degree in engineering management at Rose-Hulman in the fall, Rodriguez Real aspires to a career in the medical device industry.

"For me, this was the first step of feeling like an engineer," Rodriguez Real said. "We took a problem. We did not know how it was going to work, and we just figured it out."