Current training models for bioengineering design often do not adequately prepare students for 21st century challenges in the medical device industry as they lack appropriate training team-oriented science, critical thinking skills to identify problems, and immersion in clinical medicine, which is necessary to identify these problems. Responding to PAR 16-108, we at UC San Diego propose to re-envision our Bioengineering senior design curriculum to: (1) provide undergraduate team-based training in medical device design in a co-learning course with medical school students called ?BENG192: Inter-professional Design and Entrepreneurship in Medical Devices,? (2) incorporate clinical problem identification into the senior design project conceptualization phase via a ?BENG193: Clinical Bioengineering? course, and (3) use these project concepts as the basis for senior design team projects co-mentored by clinical and bioengineering faculty in BENG187 and BENG1XX courses. This 3-pronged approach will empower clinicians to work with student teams from the two didactic courses, whose enrollment we will double to accommodate half of all undergraduate students. Our approach will also expand beyond this coursework to incorporate the vast majority of UC San Diego Bioengineering students in their senior design teams with clinically focused project concepts. We further propose using unique and innovative educational models of team-based training, e.g. virtual reality gaming, to provide portions of this training. We believe that this approach fills a critical training gap for our bioengineering students and will prepare them for the 21st century workforce. Our approach will also fill training gaps for our medical students who have no course options to study medical device design, despite UC San Diego's proximity to a large biotechnology sector. We are confident in the potential of the program given data on student interest and the success of pilot courses and projects that have successfully competed for sustained funding. Outcomes will be measured between student cohorts with and without additional team-based design and immersion coursework as well as against previous cohorts prior to our re-envisioned curricula. Thus we are poised to build upon this success with the following ambitious but achievable aims over 5 years:
Aim 1) Develop, implement, and integrate the enrollment of Bioengineering coursework providing clinical immersion and medical device design into Bioengineering senior design, Aim 2) Facilitate the integration of clinical mentors into senior design team mentorship and product development, and Aim 3) Disseminate program materials through interdisciplinary campus events and through regional and national networks. We will accomplish these goals by assembling a team of over 30 clinical mentors from a diverse set of specialties to complement 5 didactic course instructors and bioengineering academic support staff.
Design education in bioengineering often does not sufficiently cultivate team-oriented or critical thinking skills or provide clinical exposure to familiarize students with current bottlenecks in the practice of medicine. This proposed training plan will expand on a successful clinical immersion course for undergraduate bioengineering students at UC San Diego, integrate it into the senior design curriculum course flow, and develop co-learning teams with medical students to provide the vast majority of Bioengineering undergraduate students with clinically-focused senior design projects. The outcomes of this project will be a team-oriented workforce with the critical thinking skills and clinical exposure to design devices that create transformative medical devices for a wide range of health and healthcare solutions.
