Health and Wellness Engineering

Health and Wellness Engineering
by Dr. Wilfredo Jose

Abstract

Professionally, health and wellness is usually the concern of health and medical practitioners. The analogy and similarity between biological and engineering systems are striking that engineers become interested in studying potential applications. The human body is more complicated than many engineering systems, and applying engineering principles to the human body can logically improve its performance. In this paper, five major principles (mass balance, energy balance, momentum balance, charge balance, and moment balance) are applied to the human body. About 2 dozen auxiliary principles (fundamentals usually studied in physics and chemistry) supplement the major principles. Examples of some practical applications are discussed. Direct applications of some principles may not be simple and have some limitations. Genetic makeup, environmental factors, and lifestyle practices largely affect the performance of the human body. A more realistic alternative is to apply the principle of preventive maintenance of engineering systems to the human body. This will result in a well functioning and healthy body.

From Jose, W. I., "The Application of Engineering Principles to Health and Wellness", Paper presented at the The 10th Science Council of Asia Conference, Sofitel Philippine Plaza, Manila, June 15, 2010 [edit] Article reprinted from Ingenium 2007, The UP Alumni Engineers' Digest"

I am a College of Eng’g alumnus because I finished my MS from the U.P.Ch.E. Department. I obtained my BSChE degree from another school. It must be a good school; otherwise Dr. Rey Vea would not want to be President of that school. During my undergraduate years, I spent my leisure hours solving chemical engineering and mathematics problems. During the exams it always turned out that I have already solved at least one or two problems in almost all the exams. I consider that luck, which was with me in the Board Exams (where I got first place), and in the M.S. and Ph.D. courses. I compiled the solutions of the problems I solved and made a reviewer for my own use. A friend borrowed it and unknown to me, he photocopied it and other people used it. Years later, I learned that this reviewer was being used in other schools. Up to now, some people thank me for having used the unauthorized reviewer and passed the board exam. Hey, where’s my royalty! (joke) But I did not want to be known as an author of a reviewer, so I started writing a book. However it took me so long to publish it. Watch out for the first book in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, “Introductory Concepts in Chemical Engineering”, to be published by Alex Sy of Alexan. It contains an easier teaching strategy. The next will be “Biotechnology for Engineers”, which features a new teaching strategy and original researches. I like to tell jokes but they are corny. My adviser in the US did not like them and called them “Willy Joke”. Watch out for my third book, “Willy Jokes by Willy Joe”. (No joke, really.)

They say I do many researches and I really loved to do researches. However, some circumstances prevented me to pursue the work as hard as I should. Instead, I turned my attention more and more to social science aspect particularly on the concept of paradigms. I attended the seminar by Stephen Covey on invitation by Proctor and Gamble. At about the same time, I received a monograph describing the frontiers of chemical engineering. In these two instances, paradigms were described. I became interested in the concept and I started probing the paradigm of chemical engineering. It was very intuitive. I gradually developed a technique of promoting creativity and innovation. I first turned my attention to formulating teaching strategies and innovations and came out with several methods. I have probed the paradigms of biotechnology and biochemical engineering, environmental engineering, energy engineering, and engineering design. One of the results of probing paradigms is the truth about chemical engineering. Some people comment that chemical engineering is a dying profession, gauging from the falling enrollment in other schools. But that is not the case in other countries. The problem in the Philippines is that the state of our technology cannot offer applications for this profession. Probing its paradigm will tell us that all the basic principles in science and engineering is provided by chemical engineering that we can consider a good basic background for applied science and engineering disciplines.