INNOVATIVE TECHNOLOGIES IN BIOENGINEERING RESEARCH AND EDUCATION: CHALLENGES, SOLUTIONS, AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

Medical bioengineering (MBE) and Biomedical engineering (BME) are two of the prominent scientific and economic domains nowadays. In conformity with the Bioengineering Consortium definition (BECON), bioengineering integrates the principles of physics, chemistry or mathematics with engineering for the study of biology, medicine, behavior or health. Thus, bioengineering creates fundamental concepts and knowledge from a molecular to a systemic level and develops new biological products, materials, processes, implants and computer products for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of disease, for patient rehabilitation and the improvement of health status.

The scope of this paper is to emphasize an innovative approach in bioengineering education: robotics technology. We present a new robotic lab at the Department of Biomedical Science, Faculty of Medical Bioengineering (FMBE), “Grigore T. Popa” University of Medicine and Pharmacy of Iasi, Romania. The focus of the lab are the improvement of bioengineering education by teaching interdisciplinary technical capabilities using hands-on projects based on educational robotics.

The first part of the paper was dedicated to the available solutions which refer to the robots used in education. Characteristics, costs, strengths and weaknesses of some available solutions was compared and evaluated to introduce a guideline for an efficient method to support teaching bioengineering topics using educational robot.

In the second part of the paper there are presented some activities based-robotics which use data-collection technology to improve science process skills, deepen understanding of science concepts, meet national and European educational standards, and support a robotic framework for bioengineering education.