Integrating Bme Into Ece Curriculum: An Alternate Approach For Meeting The Nation's Need For Qualified Bme Professionals

A time honored technique for introducing students to new and emerging topics is to offer electives; however, there are a few major drawbacks to this approach: the topic must be very focused, either depth or breath must be sacrificed, and in either case, only a very limited amount of material can be covered, and students who may not have prior background about the topic often hesitate in electing a course in which they may very well find interest. Furthermore, as the number of credits required for obtaining a BS degree decline over the years due to market pressures, so do the number of electives offered. Against this background, we propose another time-honored technique, under a new setting, as a paradigm specifically designed for integrating novel content material into existing curriculum: develop new laboratory exercises tailored to provide content specific knowledge that relate to the focus areas of existing courses. In our implementation, we use biomedical engineering (BME) as the novel content and the electrical and computer engineering (ECE) as the core curriculum, with two primary objectives: to provide ECE students with fundamental and contemporary BME knowledge for future career and graduate study opportunities; and to improve students’ interest in and comprehension of ECE concepts by acquainting them with engineering solutions to real world problems in medicine. This approach has several advantages: (1) it is versatile, any number of topics can be integrated that the faculty deems important; (2) a broad spectrum of topics can be addressed as they are distributed throughout the 4-year curriculum, (3) all students are exposed to novel content; (4) very little additional resources are required for implementation; (5) students receive a more well-rounded and broad education within their specific disciplines; (6) experiments are integrated into existing courses, keeping credit count unchanged;