Biomedical engineering is one of the more recent fields of engineering, 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. Biomedical engineering professionals are expected to achieve, during their studies and professional practice, considerable knowledge of both health sciences and engineering. Studying biomedical engineering programmes, or combining pre-graduate studies in life sciences with graduate studies in engineering, or vice versa, are typical options for becoming qualified biomedical engineering professionals, although there are additional interesting alternatives, to be discussed.
According to our experience, the graduates and post-graduates from multidisciplinary engineering programmes, not just from biomedical engineering, but also from more traditional fields including industrial, mechanical and telecommunications engineering, can play varied and very relevant roles in the biomedical industry and in extremely complex biomedical device development projects. In spite of the different ways of becoming a professional of the biomedical engineering field, it is true that their impact as successful professionals can be importantly increased, by means of an adequate integration into their curricula of fundamental biomedical engineering design concepts, methodologies and good practices, applied to the development of biomedical devices.
In this study we present the complete development and comparative study of three courses, belonging to different plans of study taught at the Technical University of Madrid and benefiting from using a CDIO approach focused on the development of biomedical devices. The three courses are “Development of Medical Devices”, “Bioengineering Design” and “Biomedical Engineering”, respectively belonging to the “Bachelor’s Degree in Biomedical Engineering”, to the “Master’s Degree in Industrial Engineering” and to the “Master’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering”. During the courses, groups of students live through the development process of different biomedical devices aimed at providing answers to relevant social needs. Depending on their background and European credits assigned to the different courses, students carry out more conceptual projects or are able to live through more complete CDIO experiences. Main benefits, lessons learned and future challenges, linked to these courses, are analyzed, taking account of the results from 2014-2015 academic year.
Proceedings of the 12th International CDIO Conference, Turku, Finland, June 12-16 2016