Enhancing Biomedical Engineering Senior Design at Northwestern University

描述（由申请人提供）：西北大学的BME顶点高级设计课程是美国最古老、最受尊敬的课程之一。它是由Thomas Goldstick教授在20世纪80年代初创立的，作为一门专门通过定量建模和实验调查来培养学生技术技能的课程。近三十年后，这门课程的范围和持续时间都有所扩大，对BME课程的成功比以往任何时候都更加重要。BME高级设计课程现在是继三年级信号处理、系统识别和实验设计等预备课程之后的两到三个季度的课程，并包括口头交流方面的重要指导。许多项目涉及发展中国家的医疗设备设计，这些项目的成功催生了两个以设计为中心的全球健康技术项目。在这项建议中，我们力求通过解决大芝加哥地区部分人口的医疗问题，进一步扩大我们在资源贫乏和服务不足人口方面的工作。我们将与公共卫生和儿科项目的社会服务机构、社区诊所和教师合作，找出问题并制定基于工程的解决方案。我们还将制定实习计划，让学生继续完成他们在课堂上完成的项目。本课程围绕这些项目进行，因为这是教授工程设计的最佳方式之一。这些项目显然激励了我们的学生，社区可能会从我们所做的工作中受益，但为缺医少药人群提供医疗保健的状况，为我们的学生提供了出类拔萃的机会。无论是在南非的乡镇还是芝加哥西部的社区诊所，人口、疾病概况和经济状况都与美国主流医疗保健系统的初级医院和医生办公室不同。识别用户需求、评估可用资源和设计方法以低成本满足不熟悉环境中的功能设计要求是一项挑战。事实上，许多这些需求还没有被更大的医疗器械行业解决，这给了我们一个非凡的机会来教授工程设计的本质。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The BME Capstone Senior Design sequence at Northwestern University is among the oldest and most venerable in the nation. It was originated in the early 1980's by Prof. Thomas Goldstick as a course designed specifically to develop students' technical skills through quantitative modeling and experimental investigation. Nearly three decades later, the course has been expanded in scope and extended in duration and is more central than ever to the success of the BME curriculum. BME Capstone Senior Design is now a two or three quarter sequence that follows on from a junior year sequence of preparatory courses in signal processing, systems identification, and design of experiments, and includes significant instruction in oral communication. Many projects involve medical device design for the developing world, and the success of these projects has spawned two design-centered programs in Global Health Technologies. In this proposal we seek to further expand our work in resource-poor and underserved populations by addressing the medical problems of segments of the population in the greater Chicago area. We will collaborate with social service agencies, community clinics, and faculty in our public health and pediatrics programs to identify problems and develop engineering-based solutions. We will also develop an internship program for students to continue to work on the projects they worked on in class. The course is structured around such projects because it is one of the best ways to teach engineering design. The projects clearly motivate our students and the community may benefit from the work that we do, but it is the state of medical care for underserved populations that provides the opportunities for our students to excel. Whether in the townships of South Africa or the community clinics on the west side of Chicago, the populations, disease profiles, and economics are different than in the primary hospitals and doctors' offices of the mainstream US healthcare system. Identifying user needs, assessing the available resources and devising ways to meet the functional design requirements in unfamiliar settings at low cost is a challenge. The fact that many of these needs have not been addressed by the larger medical device industry gives us an extraordinary opportunity to teach the essence of engineering design. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Underserved populations around the globe are a rich source of design projects for biomedical engineering students. For the past five years, The BME Capstone Senior Design program at Northwestern University has partnered with institutions and centers that seek solutions to interesting and important heath problems of the poor and the young in Cape Town, South Africa. The enhancements to the program proposed here will expand these programs and extend the ideas to address analogous problems in health care in Chicago and the surrounding communities.