Wednesday, February 5, 2025
2/5/2025
Felder et al_R25_2022_Abstract_FINAL Modern engineers need to blend technical competence with global and competitive competence. For biomedical engineers, efforts to support these core competencies is to cultivate the ability to translate and commercialize design and innovation to impact the end-users. To meet this goal, we propose to establish a distributed and interdisciplinary pipeline for sustainable student-driven innovation. This proposal encompasses a comprehensive curriculum across disciplines to drive longitudinal project development and innovation. Our first specific aim is to enhance senior design project preparedness and student competency. This aim is met by thoroughly validating needs with a redesigned interdisciplinary clinical immersion program and by developing a new undergraduate biomedical engineering course to enhance student physical prototyping skills. Needs fully validated by biomedical engineering and Innovation Medicine program medical students with primary clinical experience ensures project development is aligned with the ability to commercialize a product, and enhanced student prototyping skills support realistic development with enhanced fidelity. Together these initiatives enable our second specific aim, which is to leverage interdisciplinary collaboration to enhance medtech device design. This aim is met by revising the undergraduate biomedical engineering senior design capstone to incorporate the same medical students from clinical immersion. Moreover, the senior design class will accept projects based on validated needs from clinical immersion, which enables accelerated pacing and inclusion of both verification and validation in class. Product development from senior design is then transitioned for further development to the same medical students with their own capstone experience. Continuing projects from clinical immersion to senior design and then to medical capstone has substantial benefit including the ability to retain technical development and pursuit of further development that was not otherwise possible (e.g., publication of development, execution of limited studies, pursuit of intellectual property) by one capstone experience alone. Effects of clinical immersion to validate needs and the prototyping class to enhance prototyping competency will be evaluated using surveys and deliverables. Effects of project origin (i.e., clinical immersion or other) and participation in the prototyping class will be evaluated on the ability of teams to effectively collaborate within and outside disciplines, design, verify performance requirements, and validate that design output meets original need. Long-term success of leveraging interdisciplinary collaboration for medtech device design will be evaluated by comparative assessment of medical capstone deliverables based on project origin and participation of the pipeline. This proposed pipeline has the potential to enable significant student-driven innovation. 1
HHS’ Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS) website provides access to detailed descriptions of grants, loans, aggregated direct payments and other types of financial assistance awarded by the HHS Operating Divisions (OPDIVs) and the Office of the Secretary Staff Divisions (STAFFDIVs).