2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Over the past 15 years, clinical immersion experiences in biomedical engineering (BME) have become more prevalent in curricula. At the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), our Clinical Immersion Program (CIP) has expanded over 12 years with several curricular revisions. Now, the program emphasizes identification and validation of projects for longitudinal development via a distributed and interdisciplinary pipeline. Validation of unmet clinical needs is performed using a Design Thinking framework developed by IDEO, which assesses a need/project according to three core criteria: desirability (substantiating the needs), feasibility (ability for a team to enact a solution), and viability (marketspace for a solution). However, due to the logistics associated with placing students in clinical environments, our CIP has always remained a selective experience. To scale the impact of CIP, here we describe the revision of a senior-level course entitled “Medical Technology Assessment” to incorporate key didactic materials and learning outcomes developed for CIP. In this revised course, student teams are not immersed in the clinical environment but instead navigate the Design Thinking framework as it applies to an assigned medical device innovation. At the end of the class, students prepare a final report to substantiate the innovation according to the IDEO framework. This work-in-progress reports on the programmatic scheduling, activities, assignments, and learning objectives of this course. While not a substitute for a firsthand immersion experience, this course offers a framework for assessment of medical device innovation based on core content from our CIP.