Year: 2020
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract Session 2309 TEACHING HANDS-ON BIOMEDICAL INSTRUMENTATION David J. Beebe Department of Biomedical Engineering Louisiana Tech University 711 S. Vienna Street Ruston, LA 71270 INTRODUCTION Hands-on laboratory experience is an essential component of an engineer’s undergraduate training. In this paper the above hypothesis will be supported via personal experience and results of a survey of programs offering biomedical instrumentation courses. Specific strategies for providing hands-on training, developed and implemented in the biomedical instrumentation courses at Louisiana Tech University, will be described. The strategies described are not new and in most cases are not even orginal, but rather an extension of techniques I encountered as a undergraduate student and as a teaching assistant under John Webster during graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I have attempted to take the best from these experiences and implement/improve them in my own courses at Louisiana Tech University. The examples described here are used in a sequence of two biomedical instrumentation courses. The first is taught during the spring of the junior year and covers analog instrumentation. The second is taught during the fall of the senior year and covers digital signal processing. A design project in the second course requires students to synthesize the concepts from both courses and use them to design and build a complete instrumentation system. John Webster’s text, “Medical Instrumentation,” is used for the first course and Willis Tompkin’s text, “Biomedical Digital Signal Processing,” is used for the second course 1,2. NEED FOR HANDS-ON LABORATORY EXPERIENCE “Engineers put things together to make things that haven’t been around before.” - Joe Bordogna, NSF. Assuming this description of what engineers do to be accurate, an engineers training should be structured to allow the prospective engineer time to do engineering in a practical, hands-on way. In this section, several issues relating to the need for increased quantity and quality in the undergraduate laboratory experience are discussed. Pressures to reduce credit load Biomedical engineering is, by definition, multidisciplinary. Typical biomedical engineering undergraduate curriculum includes course work in basic engineering science, biology, physiology in addition to traditional pre-engineering course work in calculus, physics and chemistry. The need for multidisciplinary training and the pressures to reduce the total number of credits can result in the omission of laboratory courses outside of the biomedical engineering department. In our curriculum, for example, the physics 1996 ASEE Annual Conference Proceedings
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--6323
Author: David J. Beebe
Institution: Louisiana Tech University
Language: English
Subfield: Biomedical Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: gold
Funder: Louisiana Tech University
OpenAlex ID: W2592366401