NCBL
NCBL

University of Alberta

Karla Beltrán Martínez

Karla.jpg

About ME

I am a Research assistant at the University of Alberta in the Mechanical Engineering department. I graduated from my master’s program with the thesis: “Risk assessment for work-related musculoskeletal injury using wearable sensors” in the NCB lab in January 2021. I graduated with a B.Sc in Mechatronics engineering from Tecnologico de Monterrey at Jalisco, Mexico. During my undergraduate studies, I participated in many projects like a low-cost prosthesis for humanitarian applications, a Stewart platform, and a scaled autonomous car using image processing.

My current work includes: 1) the design of a wearable device to measure biometrics during the day (heart rate, temperature, oxygen saturation, respiration rate and blood pressure), 2) an ergonomic body suit to calculate joint angles, an ergonomic injury risk score (REBA). The scores can be displayed in real time, and immediate feedback is given to the user when there is a risk, and 3) perform ergonomic assessments for different tasks with and without exoskeletons.

Supervisor:

  • Dr. Hossein Rouhani

Research Interests:

  • Wearable Technologies for Human Activity Monitoring

  • Biomedical instrumentation for injury prevention and rehabilitation

  • Applied Biomechatronics for life improvement

PROJECTs

Publications

[1] Santana, Juan & Beltran, Karla & Barocio, Eduardo & I. Lopez-Avina, Gabriel & Huegel, Joel. (2018). Development of a Low-Cost and Multi-Size Foot Prosthesis for Humanitarian Applications. 1-8. 10.1109/GHTC.2018.8601851.

[2] K. Beltran Martinez, M. Nazarahari and H. Rouhani, "Analysis of muscle activity and muscle fatigue during a material handling task," in 21st Annual AB BME Conference, pp. 42, 2020.

[3] K. Beltran Martinez, M. Nazarahari and H. Rouhani, "K-score: A novel scoring system to quantify fatigue-related ergonomic risk based on joint angle measurements via wearable inertial measurement units" in Applied Ergonomics. 102, 2022.