2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This poster reviews strategies for empathy education and assessment in biomedical engineering. In an increasingly globalized society, modern day engineers are expected to participate and problem solve within sociotechnical arenas such as climate change, healthcare, and poverty. These complex problems require modern day engineers to have both technical acumen and the social and professional skills to understand the societal impacts of their designs on multiple stakeholders. This is reflected in the second student outcome required for undergraduate engineering accreditation in the United States which states that graduates should have “an ability to apply engineering design to produce solutions that meet specified needs with consideration of public health, safety, and welfare, as well as global, cultural, social, environmental, and economic factors” (ABET citation). Engineers can consider these factors in their designs by taking into account stakeholder needs using empathy, which is often operationalized as perspective-taking. The ability to step into the perspectives of others allows engineers to produce sound technical solutions that have positive societal impact and limit potential harm. This skill is particularly important in biomedical engineering because biomedical engineers are often positioned more closely to their stakeholders (such as patients and doctors) than other engineering disciplines and biomedical engineering has direct impacts within medicine and healthcare.
In the past several years, empathy has become a research interest in biomedical engineering education. This review aims to summarize and synthesize instructional activities and assessments for empathy in undergraduate biomedical engineering education. It is important to note that no single educational activity or assessment can serve as the gold standard. Empathy education is most effective when it is incorporated continuously and holistically within a program of instruction (Lunn et al., 2022b). Thus, this work does not assess the utility of empathy activities and assessments. Rather, it is a resource for biomedical engineering educators to incorporate activities and assessments to support empathy development in their courses. There is a large body of literature regarding empathy education in STEM. This work will review instructional activities and assessments that have been implemented specifically in the context of biomedical engineering. This scope provides discipline specific insight for biomedical engineering educators and will highlight gaps in empathy education research in BME.