2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The University of Arkansas Department of Biomedical Engineering has developed a course titled “Clinical Observations and Needs Finding” for junior-level undergraduate students. This course introduces students to the technical, professional, and ethical responsibilities of a biomedical engineer in the context of engineering product design and development. Students engage in team-based projects that they identify after completing clinical rotations in local medical facilities, clinics, or hospitals. In the course of these projects, students engage the full scope of the engineering design process, with particular attention to clinical needs finding, problem definition, and preliminary design. The Clinical Needs Finding course serves as a prerequisite to the Senior Design Capstone Project course, to foster innovation and product development that is directly relevant to local healthcare professionals and patients. Furthermore, the course prepares students to successfully identify, select and complete a project in the senior design capstone course. The course is officially designated as service-learning due to the strong involvement with the local community and the aim to close the gap in local healthcare disparities.

This course fits logically into the undergraduate biomedical engineering curriculum, but the specific effects of the course and its specific implementation have yet to be quantified. This study sought to measure the effectiveness of the course in terms of meeting the course outcomes and long-term impacts on Senior Design projects. Specifically, we examined student-led intellectual property creation, student attitudes toward engineering design, and biomedical engineering students’ performance in university-wide design competitions.

The office of Technology Ventures at the University of Arkansas provided data on the number of invention disclosures, patent applications, and patents awarded. We ran a query against all the Biomedical Engineering undergraduate students from 2013 to 2022 to obtain these numbers. We compared the total number of IP applications before/after 2018 (the year we introduced the clinical needs finding course as a required BMEG core course). Further, pre- and post-class surveys were used to collect student demographics and quantify students’ self-efficacy, motivations, and making connections to real-world problems. The surveys also measure students' pre/post knowledge level as related to needs finding, medical device design, regulations, intellectual property, and invention disclosures. The College of Engineering organizes an annual Senior Design Expo competition. We collected information representing the number of BMEG teams who won the competition before and after the development/implementation of the Clinical Needs Finding course. The University of Arkansas Institutional Review Board (IRB) approved the current study (IRB protocol #: 2209420237).

The total number of IP applications increased more than two-fold following the adoption of the Clinical Observations and Needs Finding course. This significant increase can be attributed to the introduction of IP topics in the class as well as the accelerated product development cycle in senior design because the students enter the course with established user needs as well as an established relationship with a clinical partner. It is worth mentioning that the IP data reported here is only obtained from the UofA Technology Ventures office. Some students decide to protect their IP using their own private funding or other sponsorships such as the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Bioventures office. Survey results assessing students’ collective understanding of the role of an engineer in the medical device industry indicated an improved understanding of the design process beyond being able to identify and handle open-ended problems in other conventional classes (such as Biomechanics). This survey also indicated a high level of enthusiasm for the field of medical device engineering broadly defined. There is also a high level of enthusiasm for the Clinical Needs and Observations course itself, with students specifically identifying excitement for the opportunities to speak with clinical professionals and gain an understanding of the role engineers can play in clinical settings. After the introduction of the Clinical Observations and Needs Finding course in 2018, although interrupted by the COVID pandemic, the Biomedical Engineering senior design teams were consistently well represented in the top-three teams among all College of Engineering expo. That indicates that our students had a better grasp of the design process due to the extensive needs finding that preceded the senior design course.

Our preliminary results indicate that the introduction of the clinical observations course had a positive impact on our undergraduate Biomedical Engineering students. Our team is conducting a longitudinal study to track the short-term (via survey data, and IP applications) and long-term (via students' exit survey and job placement data) performance of the course and its continued impact on the program.