2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Modern engineers need to match technical competence with global and competitive awareness. For biomedical engineers (BMEs), efforts to support this require understanding healthcare needs, capacity for commercialization, and processes for innovation. To meet this goal, we are establishing an interdisciplinary pipeline for student-driven innovation. This work encompasses a comprehensive curriculum across disciplines to drive longitudinal project development and innovation. Our first aim is to enhance senior design (SD) project preparedness by both redesigning our interdisciplinary Clinical Immersion Program (CIP) to identify and validate clinical needs using the IDEO innovation framework and introducing a new course to enhance students’ prototyping skills. Needs fully validated by BME and first-year medical students in our summer CIP ensures project development is aligned with the ability to commercialize a product, and enhanced student prototyping skills support realistic project development with enhanced fidelity. Together these efforts enable our second aim, which is to leverage interdisciplinary collaboration to enhance medtech device design by revising the undergraduate BME SD courses to incorporate the same medical students from the CIP. Moreover, the SD course will accept projects based on validated needs from CIP, which enables accelerated pacing and inclusion of both engineering design verification and validation. Projects from SD are then transitioned for further development to the same medical students who originally participated in CIP with their own required co-curricular capstone course. Continuing projects from CIP to SD and then to medical capstone has substantial benefit including the ability to retain technical progress and pursue further development that would not otherwise be possible by one capstone experience alone (e.g., publication, execution of limited studies, filing of intellectual property). In an initial implementation, demonstrating a project that transitioned through this interdisciplinary pipeline, a need related to the acquisition of tear film fluids was first identified in CIP and then transitioned to SD for technical development. The BME students rendered a functional prototype which the medical students further developed during their medical capstone. In a more methodical implementation of the pipeline in the summer of 2022, three of five proposals from CIP were transitioned into SD. Of these projects, two retained BME students from CIP. Each CIP project in SD was also benefited from comprehensive documentation. Ultimately, this distribution of projects will establish four comparative assessment groups in SD defined by the permutations between projects originating from CIP or traditional solicitation, and students having participated or not in CIP. We plan to evaluate the effects of these groups and participation in the prototyping class on project outcomes in SD and medical capstone with continued data collected for longer-term assessment. As demonstrated by our initial implementation, this pipeline has the potential to enable significant student-driven innovation.