Integrating Biomedical Engineering Design into Engineering Curricula: Benefits and Challenges of the CDIO Approach

Biomedical engineering is one of the more recent fields of engineering, aimed at the application of engineering principles, methods and design concepts to medicine and biology for healthcare purposes, mainly as a support for preventive, diagnostic or therapeutic tasks. Biomedical engineering professionals are expected to achieve, during their studies and professional practice, considerable knowledge of both health sciences and engineering. Studying biomedical engineering programmes, or combining pre-graduate studies in life sciences with graduate studies in engineering, or vice versa, are typical options for becoming qualified biomedical engineering professionals, although there are additional interesting alternatives, to be discussed. According to our experience, graduates and post-graduates from more traditional and multidisciplinary engineering programmes, especially industrial engineering, can play varied and very relevant roles in the biomedical industry and in extremely complex biomedical device development projects, even outperforming the graduates from programmes mainly focused in bioengineering. However, such impact of industrial engineers in the biomedical field can be importantly increased, by means of an adequate integration of biomedical engineering design concepts, methodologies and good practices into the traditional engineering curricula. In this study we present the complete development of a novel subject on “Biomedical Engineering Design” for the Master’s Degree in Industrial Engineering at ETSII – TU Madrid. The subject is based on the CDIO approach, as we consider it a very remarkable way of promoting student active learning and of integrating, with impact, novel concepts into ongoing curricula. During the subject, groups of students live through the complete development process of different biomedical devices aimed at providing answers to relevant social needs. Computer-aided engineering and rapid prototyping technologies are used as support tools for their designs and prototypes, so as to reach the implementation and operation phases with enough time for a re-design cycle. Main benefits, lessons learned and challenges, linked to this CDIO-based subject, are analyzed, taking into account the results from 2014-2015 academic course. Students from several specializations of our Industrial Engineering MSc (i.e. Mechanical Engineering, Energy, Manufacturing Technology, Materials Science, Chemical Engineering, Automation and Electronics…) have taken part in the subject, what has helped the groups to tackle very complex biodevices and implement them with success. To our knowledge it constitutes the first subject following a complete CDIO cycle in the field of Biomedical Engineering in our country.