Lectures cover the medical industry; the product lifecycle; intellectual property; the regulatory environment and standards; ethical, societal, sustainability and risk issues in medical devices; software engineering practice; ergonomics, manufacturing and commercial considerations.
Design Project:
Each team of 4 to 6 students will consult with a commercial/clinical client to address a complex biomedical engineering problem, with guidance from an academic or industry mentor.
Philosophy:
A complex, integrative biomedical engineering design experience. Specifically, a successful design will require integration of knowledge from across the breadth of the biomedical engineering curriculum, including solid and fluid mechanics, instrumentation, mathematical modelling, and the medical sciences. In the real world, though, successful designs are about more than pure scientific and technical know-how; a good design must account for the social and political environment surrounding the problem. Thus, this course will aim to equip students with knowledge of the cultural and regulatory context for medical devices, and we expect this knowledge to be applied throughout the design process. Real designs are also created to solve complicated, messy problems; there is no one right answer, and there is no single clear question to answer. Thus, this course requires students to determine the parameters of the design problem through consultation with a clinical client, and the technical approach taken to solve it will be entirely up to the students.