Interdisciplinary medical product development senior capstone design

Abstract

Interdisciplinary Medical Product Development (IMPD) is a two-semester capstone senior design course involving students and faculty from multiple disciplines - Bioengineering, Industrial Design, Marketing, Graphic Design, and Medicine. IMPD focuses on applying a user-centered approach to the design of medical devices for the health care sector, and has the following student goals: be able to effectively work on interdisciplinary teams and better understand how other disciplines work and think, develop processes and framework to progress from abstract, high-level problem statements to specific, concrete design prototypes, and learn to effectively communicate to client-partners through oral presentations and written documentation. While team-based product design is part of the curriculum, formal and sustained interaction with end users to inform the design process is an integral of the Interdisciplinary Product Development capstone courses. The department of Bioengineering is jointly within both the College of Engineering and the College of Medicine, which facilitates student exposure to a wide variety of clinical environments with medical faculty engagement. The course is sponsored by an industry partner, who, in conjunction with faculty, provides project statements that are of strategic business interest. For this reason, all students participate under a Non-Disclosure Agreement. The first semester focuses on early front-end development, including framing the problem, human-centered design research methods in a clinical environment, and ideation. The second semester focuses on development of design criteria, concept refinement, receiving evaluative feedback from the various stakeholders (clinicians, client, end-users), and prototyping. The IMPD course challenges students to understand the "fuzzy front end" of design, verify they are developing solutions that will satisfy an unmet need, and experience the iterative nature of engineering design. This opportunity to work on a "real-world" problem in an interdisciplinary team presents challenges that include both logistic and pedagogical. In the third year offering this alternative to the more traditional bioengineering senior design course, there have been numerous enhancements to the process, including an NIH-funded Clinical Immersion summer program to provide bioengineering students an opportunity to better understand clinical needs and inclusion of medical students on teams to improve clinical feedback throughout the development process. This paper discusses the course structure, evolution, and rationale for the course.