Interdisciplinary Medical Product Development Senior Capstone Design

Abstract

Miiri Kotche is a Clinical Associate Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and currently serves as Director of the Medical Accelerator for Devices Laboratory (MAD Lab) at the UIC Innovation Center. Prior to joining the faculty at UIC, she worked in new product development for medical devices, telecommunications and consumer products. She co-teaches both bioengineering capstone design courses, including the longstanding core senior design sequence and the recently launched interdisciplinary medical product development course. With her husband, Bruce, Stephanie presently runs Materious, a design studio that produces discursive and speculative products. They are currently working on a book, Design as Discourse, which seeks to further legitimize and problematize alternate forms of design practice that extend designers' cultural agency. Interdisciplinary Medical Product DevelopmentSenior 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 usercentered 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 pedagogi...

Clinical Immersion Internship Introduces Students to Needs Assessment

“…Some preference was given to students enrolled in the Interdisciplinary Medical Product Design course over the traditional senior design capstone sequence. The IMPD course is a two-semester medical product development course that engages interdisciplinary teams of bioengineers, industrial designers, graphic designers and business students to provide a solution to a "real world" problem identified by an industry partner and co-instructors from Bioengineering, Industrial Design and Business [9]. Corporate partners over the last four years have been Baxter Healthcare and Motorola Mobility.…”

“…Students with an interest in working in the medical device industry are encouraged to enroll in IMPD. Interdisciplinary capstone design courses provide teams the opportunity to integrate theory with practice, and make effective use of the best joint resources available [9]. Indeed, ABET recognizes "the need to cross and mesh disciplinary boundaries is increasingly evident because new knowledge is increasingly created at disciplinary interfaces" [9].…”

“…Interdisciplinary capstone design courses provide teams the opportunity to integrate theory with practice, and make effective use of the best joint resources available [9]. Indeed, ABET recognizes "the need to cross and mesh disciplinary boundaries is increasingly evident because new knowledge is increasingly created at disciplinary interfaces" [9]. To that end, ABET criteria requires engineering programs to demonstrate that students can function on multidisciplinary teams [10].…”

Community Health Innovation through an Interprofessional Course

“…The problem solving and communication skills required for healthcare professionals to successfully work together are skills that will benefit other professionals such as engineers. Collaborative education between engineering and medical students has shown to result in innovation for community benefit through assistive device creation 11 , addressing real-world clinical problems 12,20,21 , and improvements to medical teaching laboratories 22 .…”

“…For example, the Interdisciplinary Medical Product Development (IMPD) senior design capstone course at the University of Illinois at Chicago involves students and faculty from bioengineering, medicine, industrial design, marketing, and graphic design. 20 At California Baptist University, engineering capstone students design devices to assist hearing impaired individuals and work with nursing students to prepare the units for clinical testing. 23 A cross institution collaboration between biomedical engineering students at Lawrence Technological University and mechanical engineering and nursing students from University of Detroit, Mercy has resulted in multidisciplinary capstone teams focused on helping patients from a local Veteran Administration hospital with physical disabilities.…”