Smart approaches in facilitating engineering students to learn health technology

Abstract

Partly due to the aging population around the world, job markets for developing biomedical devices and technology have been rapidly expanding. Organizations are recruiting engineers of various disciplines to design and test biomedical devices. This arouses interest of some engineering students to take academic subjects to learn some health technology, while keeping their main disciplines in specific engineering areas like mechanical engineering. Engineers need to have good understanding of the human body and different sorts of diseases, before they can apply good engineering solutions to solve the medical problems. However, teaching engineering students without prior education in medical-related aspects could be challenging. This paper presents the use of e-learning and some other interactive teaching approaches to facilitate master-degree engineering students to learn biomedical devices and technology. The factors which may assist in success in multi-disciplinary learning and the possibility of implementing the similar in undergraduate courses are discussed.