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Jumpstarting the Capstone Experience Through a Bioengineering Product Design Course

Introduction

Faculty at Florida Gulf Coast University have developed Bioengineering Product Design (BME 4800C) specifically to introduce concepts and skills in bioengineering product design in the semester prior to our capstone experience thus, jumpstarting students into their senior design projects. Our intent has been to use a reverse engineering, semester-long project to familiarize students with FDA regulations, intellectual property issues, and design with SolidWorks, among other topics, in their junior year so more attention can be paid to the design, development and testing of their chosen project in their senior year. This paper provides a summary of the course structure, content, projects and evaluation of assessment results from the first offering of this course with a discussion of additional topics covered in the second offering.

Overview

Universities across the country recognize the importance of instilling design early in the engineering curriculum. Engineering programs routinely have introductory design courses as first-year experiences to initiate discussion on various important engineering skills, and then the senior capstone design courses focus on individual or team projects where students step through the design process. If elements of the product design process are left until the senior year, there may be too many topics to cover in the design of medical devices, and final projects may fall short of full completion due to the number of skills professors want to instill in their students.

course in their design sequence that includes topics in device benchmarking, the FDA, and patents and intellectual property.1 Other programs have developed separate senior level design courses to cover such topics as universal design. Western New England College offers a semester long course in universal design, based on the NISH National Scholar Award for Workplace Innovation & Design.2,3 Indeed the importance of biomedical engineering design has launched BME-IDEA, where different university programs come togethe

showcase their design programs at day-long workshops to highlight best practices and discuss possibilities for sharing resources and creating web-based tools.4

Our program is faced with the additional challenge of offering an interdisciplinary capstone design course with bioengineers, civil and environmental engineers, where we encounter differences in design requirements and important subject matter. Since some of the topics discussed in medical device design are not relevant to engineers in the other majors, the faculty needed to design a course that introduced these topics earlier and that provided a mechanism for the students to appreciate the different challenges in bioengineering product design. The

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Csavina, K., & Sweeney, J. (2009, June), Jumpstarting The Capstone Experience Through A Bioengineering Product Design Course Paper presented at 2009 Annual Conference & Exposition, Austin, Texas. 10.18260/1-2--5039