Applying a Human-Centered Design Approach to Enhance Bioengineering Education

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Project Summary Capstone Senior Design courses enable bioengineering (BIOE) seniors to engage with the design process and apply technical fundamentals and industry related topics, ultimately generating a functional prototype. Our capstone program at Rice University, solicits project ideas from research faculty, physicians, and industry leaders. Interdisciplinary teams drive the prototype development throughout the year and submit oral presentation and documentation deliverables. Students in our capstone program enjoy immense advantage offered by a well-equipped design facility and infrastructure at Rice University to support projects from the Texas Medical Center, home to the world’s largest children’s and cancer hospital and the largest medical city in the world. These strengths, along with the cross-disciplinary teams (mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and global health technologies) rigorous senior design documentation, and oral deliverables, lead to teams placing nationally in competitions each year. Effective capstone program design, however, demands an engaged clinical experience, an area lacking in many existing programs, including ours. To address this, we propose the creation of a novel clinical immersion program with a focus on human centered design and inequities in healthcare delivery. Our program will consist of a cohort of five bioengineering seniors selected through an application process and 3 pediatric residents from Baylor College of Medicine. The cohort will attend didactic lectures on topics such as design process, needs finding, inequities in healthcare delivery, universal design, storyboarding, stakeholder communication and design de-risking. Students will apply their learnings by immersive engagement in two clinical environments: 1) Pediatric Intensive Care Unit in Texas Children’s Hospital and 2) Texas Heart Institute. Exercises such as iterative storyboarding, daily individual and group reflections and case study research on the evolution of a device design will elucidate areas of clinical challenges and critical context that can be discussed daily with faculty mentors. These exercises will also serve as student artifacts to be shared with all members of the senior design course followed by formative quiz assessments. Two unique features of our clinical immersion program include a) use of a coproduction model of education that involves equal involvement of students in program design resulting in increased ownership and engagement among the cohort1 and b) involvement of pediatric residents in observations and discussions with the bioengineering students offering an active discussion about different aspects of the clinical challenge. Through our clinical immersion program, the cohort will have the ability to engage in conversations with a diverse set of stakeholders not limited to medical practitioners. Ultimately, students will identify a set of unmet clinical needs reflecting inequities in healthcare delivery and perspectives not addressed previously. This program highlighting the inequities in healthcare deliveries will train BIOE students to develop human centered biomedical solutions.