2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

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.