Switching perspectives: Physicians meet Engineers in a Novel Lab on Medical Device Development

Abstract

Education nowadays often still lacks in seeing the big picture. While becoming an expert in a certain, narrow field is naturally desirable, switching disciplinary perspectives is mandatory for an overall understanding. Next to benefiting from the knowledge of other disciplines itself, the merging of two disciplines and their actors leads to a synergy effect through the exchange of their knowledge and experience. Therefore a mixed course structure consisting of theoretical and practical parts seems most feasible to guarantee varying degrees of didactic approaches including co-operative course designs. In this paper our already well established advanced lab on medical device development (part of the Bachelor's degree in Computer Science) and its enhancement towards an interdisciplinary lab and lecture with medical students is presented. Based on the existing lab, we analyze the prior knowledge of physicians and computer scientists and derive contents, structure and necessary competence goals for a four-week block course. The main objective of the lab is to enable the students of both disciplines to share a common language and a common understanding of the procedures, approaches and tools.