Exposure to the clinical environment - where the eventual results of student's engineering efforts are utilized - is a powerful educational experience. It provides real-world context for learning efforts and a hands-on opportunity for developing students to learn how to communicate effectively with their key stakeholders. Over the past five years, the Biomedical Engineering program at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly) has developed and implemented a summer program focusing on providing a small cohort (10) of rising junior students with immersive exposure to the clinical environment, intensive practice with clinical needs finding, and hands-on experience in the biomedical engineering innovation lifecycle. This unique approach to timing the clinical experience, paired with feedback and feedforward integration throughout the curriculum, maximized the impact in a setting with limited resources. This paper will share key steps to take to initiate similar programs, highlight methods for program and curricular integration, and discuss the results of program impact assessment.
The biomedical engineering (BME) workforce requires competency in professional and technical skills, which should be practiced and repeated throughout the undergraduate curriculum. We developed a core, sophomore-level, medical devices course in which students simulate the engineering teams found in industry to develop workplace-ready skills. The goals of requiring this new course in our curriculum are to • Increase students' biomedical engineering professional identity, which we anticipated would occur as a result of earlier exposure to BME roles and skills. • Increase students' industry-relevant skills (described in the course learning goals). • Introduce students to the variety of career opportunities within medical devices industry. The scope of this Work in Progress is to describe students' perceptions of the pilot course, as evaluated through a focus group. In the course, students worked in teams of 3-4, each with a defined role modeled after those from the medical devices industry. Teams explored three medical device units in spring 2022: surgical staplers, breast pumps, and stents. Each 4-week unit consisted of four key topics: needs identification, design requirements, regulatory, and ethics. The course focused on understanding these existing devices and their limitations, not on designing a new device. Students accessed the voice of the customer (VoC) through pre-recorded video interviews conducted by the instructor, which students used to define unmet needs of existing devices and propose design requirements. At the end of each unit, student teams submitted deliverables using templates modeled after company forms. The first implementation of BMEG260: Introduction to Medical Device Design affirmed the course structure and the benefits of the selected medical devices, video interviews, teamwork, and guest speakers.
In modern Electrical Engineering degree programs, MATLAB is often one of the first coding experiences a student is exposed to.Most introductory robotics courses that combine hardware and software require students to understand C (typically learned during junior year) or require part of the course to teach coding syntax.In order to introduce robotics and cyber-physical systems earlier in the curriculum, we have developed an interface to allow students to remotely control a wireless microcontroller (e.g., Arduino MKR 1010) using MATLAB.This interface comprises two halves: 1) a MATLAB class that abstracts UDP commands transmitted over Wi-Fi, and 2) a custom C++ library for receiving, parsing, and responding to commands over UDP, as well as streaming data back to the client.The interface leverages students' existing knowledge of MATLAB and bypasses the need for C programming, allowing students to get early exposure to hardware-software integration, signal processing, edge computing, end-to-end platform development, and systems engineering.Our interface facilitates data observation, recording, manipulation, and analysis.Students have access to live data streams, real-time plots of sensor values, and the ability to use the command window to run and test individual commands outside of scripts.We deployed this system in an introductory class where students perform various mechatronic lab exercises and complete a final project where their robot navigates a maze then collects and classifies objects using sensor data and neural networks.We surveyed two semesters of students at the end of the course, and students reported that using this interface enhanced their learning experience despite varied responses about the difficulty of implementation.With the growing importance of data science in electrical engineering, tools like our interface play a crucial role in exposing students to cutting-edge robotics and cyber-physical systems earlier in the degree program.Our interface has been made available on GitHub for any who wishes to implement it.
Bioadhesives are an important class of biomaterials for wound healing, hemostasis, and tissue repair. To develop the next generation of bioadhesives, there is a societal need to teach trainees about their design, engineering, and testing. This study designed, implemented, and evaluated a hands-on, inquiry-based learning (IBL) module to teach bioadhesives to undergraduate, master's, and PhD/postdoctoral trainees. Approximately 30 trainees across three international institutions participated in this IBL bioadhesives module, which was designed to last approximately 3 h. This IBL module was designed to teach trainees about how bioadhesives are used for tissue repair, how to engineer bioadhesives for different biomedical applications, and how to assess the efficacy of bioadhesives. The IBL bioadhesives module resulted in significant learning gains for all cohorts; whereby, trainees scored an average of 45.5% on the pre-test assessment and 69.0% on the post-test assessment. The undergraduate cohort experienced the greatest learning gains of 34.2 points, which was expected since they had the least theoretical and applied knowledge about bioadhesives. Validated pre/post-survey assessments showed that trainees also experienced significant improvements in scientific literacy from completing this module. Similar to the pre/post-test, improvements in scientific literacy were most significant for the undergraduate cohort since they had the least amount of experience with scientific inquiry. Instructors can use this module, as described, to introduce undergraduate, master's, and PhD/postdoctoral trainees to principles of bioadhesives.
