Coordinated design and implementatión of 'Bioingeneering Design' and 'MedTECH' courses by means of CDIO projects linked to medical devices

Biomedical engineering is aimed at the application of engineering principles, methods and design concepts to medicine and biology for healthcare purposes, mainly as a support for preventive, diagnostic or therapeutic tasks, and is directly connected with professional practice in the medical device development sector. Industrial and management engineers, due to their broad education and global view, can significantly contribute to the advances in the biomedical field, especially if they learn some essential biomedical concepts and train specific professional skills during their higher education degrees. In this study we present the coordinated design and implementation of two courses devoted to the biomedical engineering field, namely “Bioengineering Design” and “MedTech”, included in the Master’s Degree in Industrial Engineering and in the Master’s Degree in Engineering Management respectively, both at the ETSI Industriales from Universidad Politecnica de Madrid. These courses follow the framework established by the Industriales Ingenia Initiative, which is completely aligned with the spirit of the International CDIO Initiative, as presented in recent CDIO Conferences. Students from both courses collaborate in teams and live through the complete development life cycle of innovative medical devices (linked to relevant health concerns), from the product planning and specification stages, through the conceptual and basic engineering phases, including final validations with real prototypes, towards pre-production and commercialization considerations. These projects stand out for their degree of complexity and counting with such multidisciplinary teams, in which students from different backgrounds and with varied skills intimately collaborate, constitutes an interesting strategy for addressing the life cycle of innovative biodevices with a holistic approach. Socio-economic issues, technical considerations, environmental sustainability and overall viability are among the key aspects assessed by the students following systematic (bio)engineering design methodologies. The team of professors has also lived somehow through a complete and challenging CDIO cycle, during the conception, curricular design, first implementation and assessment of these synchronized teaching-learning experiences, but the improvement of students’ learning outcomes and the inspiring ambience of collaboration created are worth the efforts. Main benefits, lessons learned and future challenges, linked to these courses and to the collaborative presented strategy, are analyzed, taking account of the available results from 2017-2018 academic year.