Multidisciplinary Patient-Centered Capstone Senior Design Projects

Capstone design projects are the culmination of the student learning process at the undergraduate level and provide an opportunity for students to work on real-world, open-ended problems. Following the engineering design process, students discover needs, propose solutions, build prototypes and test the implemented design. There are many models that exist in the exact implementation of this student experience, which satisfies many of the outcomes required by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET), ranging from need-based design to basic research.1 A common model for biomedical engineering (BME) students is to interact with clinicians such as nurses, doctors and residents, through interviews and in some cases, immersion experiences.2 In other cases, faculty may communicate with the clinicians or industrial sponsors and provide the students with a set of problems.3 This paper introduces a new model for empathy-driven design experiences that have been implemented through a collaboration between three departments, spread across two universities. The research questions leading to the development of an alternative educational model were threefold: 1. Does a multidisciplinary approach to capstone design enhance student understanding of the importance of collaboration in the design process? 2. Does the use of actual clients with physical disabilities improve student recognition of social responsibility? 3. Does a multidisciplinary, multiple university educational model lead to improved technologies compared to a single discipline approach? Over the past two years, BME students at Lawrence Technological University (LTU) have been working on multidisciplinary teams with mechanical engineering (ME) and nursing students from University of Detroit, Mercy (UDM). At the heart of this collaborative effort are Veterans (‘clients’) with physical disabilities from a local Veteran Administration (VA) hospital who volunteer to interact with the multidisciplinary student teams. This patient-centered model is a transformative experience for the students and there are many aspects of customer-interaction, needs finding and brainstorming that are not possible with the aforementioned models. Students not only learn how to interact with people living with various types and degrees of disabilities but in many cases build long lasting relationships with the clients. The experience also fosters the social responsibility aspect of the engineering and healthcare professions since in most cases, the teams have to understand and incorporate the socioeconomic conditions and cultural pretexts specific to the client. The opportunity to have a direct impact on the quality of a client’s life is a driving force for student design. However, successful implementation of such a model requires significant planning and close interaction between instructors, hospital partners, and university departments. Communication between student teams is of paramount importance and is often found to be the