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.
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