Enhancing Biomedical Engineering Senior Design at Northwestern University

描述（由申请人提供）：西北大学的BME顶点高级设计序列是全国最古老，最受尊敬的序列之一。它是由托马斯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研究来培养学生技术技能的课程。近三十年后，这门课程的范围扩大了，持续时间延长了，比以往任何时候都更重要的是BME课程的成功。BME顶点高级设计现在是一个两个或三个季度的序列，从信号处理，系统识别和实验设计的预科课程的大三序列，并包括在口头交流的重要指示。许多项目涉及为发展中国家设计医疗器械，这些项目的成功催生了全球健康技术的两个以设计为中心的项目。在这项提案中，我们寻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中的工作。我们将与社会服务机构，社区诊所和教师在我们的公共卫生和儿科项目合作，以确定问题和开发基于工程的解决方案。我们还将开发一个实习计划，让学生继续从事他们在课堂上工作的项目。该课程是围绕这些项目的结构，因为它是教工程设计的最佳方式之一。这些项目显然激励我们的学生和社区可能会从我们所做的工作中受益，但它是医疗保健的状态为服务不足的人群，为我们的学生提供了脱颖而出的机会。无论是在南非的乡镇还是在芝加哥西侧的社区诊所，人口、疾病概况和经济状况都与美国主流医疗体系的基层医院和医生办公室不同。确定用户需求、评估可用资源和制定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，这些需求中有许多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。 公共卫生相关性：地球仪周围服务不足的人群是生物医学工程专业学生设计项目的丰富来源。在过去的五年里，西北大学的BME顶点高级设计项目与机构和中心合作，寻求解决南非开普敦穷人和年轻人有趣而重要的健康问题。对这里提出的方案的改进将扩大这些方案，并将想法扩展到解决芝加哥和周边社区卫生保健中的类似问题。

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.