Transforming the BME Design Experience from Freshman to Senior Year

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Project Summary/Abstract Most senior design courses in Biomedical Engineering (BME) challenge students with the task of creating engineered solutions to unsolved clinical problems. This experience, however, is often the first time in the curriculum that students are exposed to needs finding, communicating with clinicians, following an engineering process to generate innovative solutions, and incorporating user feedback. Through the proposed activities, we will introduce clinical innovation experiences earlier in the curriculum so that BME students enter their capstone year as experienced innovators. We will capitalize on existing partnerships between medicine, engineering and business in design, innovation, and entrepreneurship to form an early interdisciplinary BME education that fosters more experienced and creative biomedical engineers well into the 21st century. Three specific opportunities for strategic enhancement of the BME undergraduate experience at UAB have been identified. First, there is a need to create a cohesive experience for BME underclassmen, as student exposure to BME faculty and content is limited in the first two years. Secondly, there is a large gap in time between the early design courses and the senior capstone, during which exposure to clinical problems is sparse, and design/innovation are not emphasized. Thirdly, there is a need for higher level engineering design activities in the capstone experience. The objective of the present proposal will be met through three aims. The first aim is to introduce to clinical innovation and design thinking to freshmen and sophomores by providing needs finding opportunities in a clinical setting and guiding them toward development of solutions to clinical problems in a classroom setting. In the second aim, ten rising BME juniors will take part in a 10-week summer clinical immersion in which they will perform needs finding and customer discovery surrounding medical/assistive devices or processes, develop a preliminary design/prototype, and create a business model. A faculty team will screen their output for use in the upcoming senior design course. The third aim is to enhancement the senior capstone experience by accelerating the project selection process and teaching best design practices during the first semester. In the second semester, new online modules covering business topics will free up valuable class time for advanced engineering topics and design activities that will improve student learning outcomes and increase the potential for novel, patentable designs. In addition, we will launch a new effort with the UAB Office of Disability Support Services (DSS) to recruit students with disabilities into our undergraduate program. People with disabilities represent a powerful stakeholder and given our record of accomplishment for product development in this space, this activity will serve to improve overall success and involve an underserved constituent in engineering.