Immersing student health professionals in BME design classrooms

PROJECT SUMMARY The dominant paradigm for clinical engagement during BME design education involves creating educational experiences for students to access clinical settings as a path to solving problems. Our proposal addresses three challenges with that paradigm. (1) practical limits, e.g., class size caps, that necessarily restrict

the scope of clinical engagement; (2) the, often overwhelming, nature of the immersion environment amplifies novice designers’ tendency to approach design as fact gathering instead of creating shared understanding, and (3) students’ perceptions of medical doctors as omniscient and authoritative information sources results in bias

in how BME students’ use information from them in design. Summarily, the current paradigm reinforces the deductive thinking and post-positivist perspective to teaching design that design education seeks to disrupt. Our proposal, and approach to challenging this paradigm, places student health professionals into courses

across our undergraduate BME curriculum. Our approach builds on frameworks for user-collaborative as opposed to user-centered design. Doing so ensures that all our BME students interact with health professionals in a way that centers the development of shared understanding, over an extended period of time, and in a way

that avoids problematic social perceptions. We propose three specific aims: (1) Scale our pilot clinical TA program across all four required design course in our curriculum while also broadening it to include students pursuing degrees in a variety of health professions; (2) Establish an educational experience for health

professions students to develop their understanding of the FDA design process, engineering processes and knowledge, and designing thinking; and (3) Assess the learning impact of both aim 1 and aim 2 on both populations so as to enable dissemination of a longitudinal, scalable, and access-independent approach to

teaching BME students to team with healthcare professionals. Any improvements made in teaching BMEs to design are limited without strong consideration for developing interdisciplinary collaboration skills. Identifying interested and capable healthcare partners is an ongoing challenge to biomedical innovation. This is despite health professions students in our pilot noting a

strong interest in such collaboration within their peer groups. However, little training in engineering or working with engineers is available to health professionals. Previously funded work to improve design education has created significant progress in how BME students learn to design in teams, especially using authentic problems

and in real clinical settings. However, BME design education’s current path of innovation has learning and scalability limits. Further improvement necessitates centering a collaborative as opposed to observational approach to teaching user interaction. Doing so has the potential to improve the capacity of both the BME and

healthcare workforces to work together as a joint solution to solve biomedical challenges. 1