Project Summary
The Virtual Reality Unmet Clinical Needs course offered at the junior level will engage
undergraduate engineering students using online and immersive active learning
techniques to develop intuition, teamwork skills, and unmet clinical needs evaluation
prior to their senior capstone course, the BioENGINE program. This course will be
offered through online websites and virtual reality applications to allow large institutions
and those without access to medical centers to be able to perform clinical immersion
and unmet clinical needs finding for all undergraduate biomedical engineering students.
Through immersive technologies such as virtual reality, simulations, and online lectures
using manikins and staged real-life simulations, we will provide a large class size of
students the opportunity to understand how medical devices are used in the real world,
and identify novel potential commercializable solutions that they will develop during their
senior capstone course. To accomplish this, students will work in multidisciplinary teams
to develop a proposed innovative medical solution identified through the immersive
clinical environments exploration and filmed clinician interviews.
By having all students in the curriculum the ability to perform unmet clinical needs
identification and evaluation through virtual immersion, we will provide an inclusive
online active learning program to all students in our program as well as those at other
institutions. Through this strategy, all biomedical engineering students will gain more
practice, depth, and experience in listening, learning, and designing a solution to an
unmet clinical need, we hope to gain a more effective method of teaching biomedical
engineers how to solve problems in a real world situation, and how to communicate in a
team more effectively.
