Reengineering biomedical engineering curricula: a new product development approach

Product development engineers in medical industries have created design control procedures to ensure high quality designs that are as error-free as possible. The reason is simple; companies must adhere to certain engineering and manufacturing "best practices" in order to obtain certification of their devices for sale in the US and abroad. We describe here an ongoing effort to apply these industrial "best practices" to the design and implementation of a novel sequence of undergraduate biomedical computing courses within the Department of Bio-medical Engineering at Marquette University (Milwaukee, Wisconsin). We have tightly integrated our industrial advisory board into this design and development effort. The board has contributed to significantly to the orderly generation of curricular requirements, the development of course implementation designs and the evaluation of these designs per requirements.