All engineering programs must demonstrate that their students attain an understanding of professional and ethical responsibility. BM engineers are expected to be introduced to ethics at the beginning of their career. The ethical issues to be included in the curriculum and their extent still represent a challenge in Biomedical Engineering education. In this paper we present the outline of an Ethics program of study for engineering students. We discuss some of the topics that must integrate the courses on the foundations and on the practice of Ethics, as Biomedical Engineering schools must prepare professionals able to perform their duties under strong moral standards.
The broad scope of Biomedical Engineering requires careful planning when designing educational programs of the discipline, which must prepare students for a successful professional performance in a constantly changing field. Throughout the world, BME education must adapt to the dynamic concept of the profession and its scope. In this paper we present the issues that should be addressed for the successful preparation of future BM engineers in Latin America.
Modern control theory allows the representation of cardiac dynamics in the state-space, describing the operation of the vascular systems in terms of the cushioning effect of the arterial wall facing compliance changes. In this paper we use state equations to modeling the effect of the compliance variations on the arterial wall. The characteristics of the dynamics and of the calculated parameters of the model allow the distinction of hypertensive and normotensive subjects, in accordance to real clinical data.
This paper discusses some guidelines for use with the accepted fundamental canons of ethics for engineers. We present some rules of practice and professional obligations emerging from these canons. Basic recommendations for engineers dissenting on ethical grounds are also presented. Ethical issues relating to Biomedical Engineering research are illustrated. We mention some cases that could be used to further understanding the ethical implications of biomedical engineering practice.
This paper presents an adaptive-network-based fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) as a cardiac beat detector, able to classify normal vs. premature ventricular contractions. We used records from the MIT Arrhythmia Database and in-vivo records from cardiac voluntary patients to train and test our system. The system identifies premature ventricular contractions (PVC) within reasonable accuracy and compares favorably to other methods reported in the literature.
The accreditation criteria for engineering programs require that the curriculum introduce students to the ethical, social, economics and safety issues arising from the practice of engineering. This paper presents the assessment of moral judgment of biomedical engineering, dentistry and biochemistry students through the standardized Defining Issues Test (DIT). Results show that college students, as most active members of society, remain at a stage of moral development where morality is still predominantly dictated by outside forces. It is expected that after formal Ethics studies, students will score higher in the last stages of moral development, where laws are regarded as social contracts and moral reasoning is based on universal ethical principles.
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