CDIO Experiences in Biomedical Engineering: Preparing Spanish Students for the Future of Medicine and Medical Device Technology

CDIO Experiences in Biomedical Engineering: Preparing Spanish Students for the Future of Medicine and Medical Device Technology

A. Lantada, J. Olmedo, A. Felip, J. Fernandez, J. Garcia, R. Alonso, et al (2016).  CDIO Experiences in Biomedical Engineering: Preparing Spanish Students for the Future of Medicine and Medical Device Technology. 10.

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, the graduates and post-graduates from multidisciplinary engineering programmes, not just from biomedical engineering, but also from more traditional fields including industrial, mechanical and telecommunications engineering, can play varied and very relevant roles in the biomedical industry and in extremely complex biomedical device development projects. In spite of the different ways of becoming a professional of the biomedical engineering field, it is true that their impact as successful professionals can be importantly increased, by means of an adequate integration into their curricula of fundamental biomedical engineering design concepts, methodologies and good practices, applied to the development of biomedical devices.

In this study we present the complete development and comparative study of three courses, belonging to different plans of study taught at the Technical University of Madrid and benefiting from using a CDIO approach focused on the development of biomedical devices. The three courses are “Development of Medical Devices”, “Bioengineering Design” and “Biomedical Engineering”, respectively belonging to the “Bachelor’s Degree in Biomedical Engineering”, to the “Master’s Degree in Industrial Engineering” and to the “Master’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering”. During the courses, groups of students live through the development process of different biomedical devices aimed at providing answers to relevant social needs. Depending on their background and European credits assigned to the different courses, students carry out more conceptual projects or are able to live through more complete CDIO experiences. Main benefits, lessons learned and future challenges, linked to these courses, are analyzed, taking account of the results from 2014-2015 academic year.

Proceedings of the 12th International CDIO Conference, Turku, Finland, June 12-16 2016

Authors (New): 
Andrés Díaz Lantada
Jose Javier Serrano Olmedo
Antonio Ros Felip
Javier Jimenez Fernandez
Julio Muñoz Garcia
Rafael Claramunt Alonso
Jaime Carpio Huertas
Pages: 
10
Affiliations: 
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), Spain
Keywords: 
CDIO as Context
Biomedical Engineering
Biomedical Engineering Design
Active learning
integrated learning experiences
CDIO Standard 1
CDIO Standard 3
CDIO Standard 5
CDIO Standard 7
CDIO Standard 8
Year: 
2016
Reference: 
Fagette, P.H. (Ed) (1999) The Biomedical Engineering Society: An Historical Perspective, BMES, USA. : 
Biomedical Engineering Society: Planning a career in biomedical engineering. BMES, USA. : 
Crawley, E.F., Malmqvist, J., Östlund, S., Brodeur, D.R. (2007) Rethinking Engineering Education: The CDIO Approach. Springer, 1-286: 
Shuman, L.J., Besterfield-Sacre, M., Mc Gourty, J. (2005) The ABET professional skills, can they be taught? Can they be assessed? Journal of Engineering Education, 94, 41-55. : 
Díaz Lantada, A., Lafont Morgado, P., Muñoz-Guijosa, J.M., Muñoz Sanz, J.L., Echávarri Otero, J., Muñoz García, J., Chacón Tanarro, E., De la Guerra Ochoa, E. (2013) Towards successful project-based learning experiences in Engineering Education. Int. Journal of Eng. Education, 29(2), 476-490. : 
Hernandez Bayo, A., Ortiz Marcos, I., Carretero Díaz, A., De la Fuente, M.M., Lumbreras Martín, J., Martínez Muneta, M.L., Riveira Rico, V., Rodríguez Hernández, M. (2014) Integral framework to drive engineering education beyond technical skills. International Journal of Engineering Education, 30(6B), 1697-1707. : 
CDIO Standards 2.0: http://www.cdio.org/implementing-cdio/standards/12-cdio-standards: 
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