Enhancing Biomedical Engineering Education Clinical Needs Finding Courses through Immersive and Virtual Experiences

Project Summary The Virtual Reality Unmet Clinical Needs course offered at the junior level will engage undergraduate engineering students using online and immersive active learning techniques to develop intuition, teamwork skills, and unmet clinical needs evaluation prior to their senior capstone course, the BioENGINE program. This course will be offered through online websites and virtual reality applications to allow large institutions and those without access to medical centers to be able to perform clinical immersion and unmet clinical needs finding for all undergraduate biomedical engineering students. Through immersive technologies such as virtual reality, simulations, and online lectures using manikins and staged real-life simulations, we will provide a large class size of students the opportunity to understand how medical devices are used in the real world, and identify novel potential commercializable solutions that they will develop during their senior capstone course. To accomplish this, students will work in multidisciplinary teams to develop a proposed innovative medical solution identified through the immersive clinical environments exploration and filmed clinician interviews. By having all students in the curriculum the ability to perform unmet clinical needs identification and evaluation through virtual immersion, we will provide an inclusive online active learning program to all students in our program as well as those at other institutions. Through this strategy, all biomedical engineering students will gain more practice, depth, and experience in listening, learning, and designing a solution to an unmet clinical need, we hope to gain a more effective method of teaching biomedical engineers how to solve problems in a real world situation, and how to communicate in a team more effectively.