2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Biomedical engineers (BME) apply engineering principles to solve problems in biology and medicine and have contributed to revolutionary and life-saving outcomes, such as artificial organs, advanced prosthetics, and new pharmaceuticals. As their impact on healthcare and society is significant, how they learn to approach a problem is critical. Exposing engineering students to non-technical proficiencies such as empathy, ethics, inclusivity, and social justice has been linked to more cutting-edge problem-solving, that incorporates the technical with the social, cultural, economic, political, and historical aspects of those affected by the problem; thereby generating more broadly applicable, accessible, and socially just solutions.

Disparities in healthcare, or differences in health outcomes between majority and minority populations, are a result of complex sociologic, political, cultural, economic, and health systems factors. These gaps in health outcomes are expected to widen, as those populations most vulnerable to health disparities are among the fastest growing. This crisis needs to be addressed by all stakeholders, including legislators, health professionals, and insurers; but also, other societal entities, such as those who design, build, and administer biomedical and medical technology. Biomedical engineering, by its interdisciplinary nature, is well suited to address such complex challenges. Some effort is being done to incorporate healthcare disparities into biomedical engineering course curricula, but more work is needed in this area.

A structured curriculum was developed and implemented in a 3rd year BME physiology course at a R1 university which uses healthcare disparities as a tool to teach students how to integrate social justice into their biomedical problem-solving approaches. As physiology content typically includes medical pathology and diseases, the use of healthcare disparities is a compelling tool for this objective.

Class design: The semester began with an overview of social justice and its importance in engineering work, followed by a summary of healthcare disparities as a form of social injustice. To help students engage with this content and prepare them for a semester of such discussions, they were asked to reflect in writing about a BME-related healthcare disparity that has affected them or someone they know and to use these stories to create a case study, which was shared on the LMS discussion board for other students to comment on.

The course covers four organ systems: 1) neuro, 2) endocrine, 3) renal, and 4) gastrointestinal. The following components are included in each system:
1. The fundamentals of physiology and pathophysiologies for that system
2. A discussion of healthcare disparities that exist within that system, with a special emphasis on ones that are BME-related.
3. Completion of discussion questions for that system. This assignment includes questions that force students to dig a little deeper and use external sources of information to find answers. As part of the healthcare disparities curriculum, two questions were added to this assignment for each system: a) Socially contextualize a decontextualized biomedical problem related to this system, and b) Reflect on the social justice issues that arise in biomedical design within this organ system.

Additionally, students were given two assignments challenging them to reflect on particular ethical and inequity issues in the context of a) neuroengineering and b) medical device design.

Finally, students were asked to complete two team projects as described below:
• Brain-Computer Interface Team Project: Teams propose a brain-computer interface design to help a patient regain a lost sense and give a 7-minute presentation introducing the idea along with a summary of any potential healthcare disparities or societal impacts that may result from their chosen problem and their proposed design.
• Healthcare Disparity Infographic Team Project: This project asks teams to create an informative and engaging infographic about a particular BME-related healthcare disparity. The infographic must describe the disparity, the populations affected and how, the current outcomes of that disparity, what role BMEs play in contributing to the disparity, and how can BMEs work to eliminate the disparity.

Assessment: Using an IRB-approved protocol, a sequential mixed-methods approach employing both quantitative and qualitative methods in the form of pre- and post-semester surveys will be use to gain an understanding of how the inclusion of this healthcare disparities curriculum affects student awareness of these social injustices and biomedical engineers’ role in addressing them, the value they place on addressing disparities and other social injustices in biomedical design, and what aspects of the curriculum led to these views.