Abstract:

The present work describes a proposal to nurture an innovative strategy in higher education to address a real life problem and design feasible solutions, shaped as biomedical prototypes, with the contribution of the students enrolled in biomedical engineering program through the activities and means of the university.

This framework shows a collaboration scheme within an external private company and internal university entities to foster and develop technological solutions in the biomedical field and improve the outcomes for all the stakeholders: Physical therapy professionals, rehabilitation center’s patients, the whole population of biomedical engineering students and the university faculty.

This learning experience was composed by the following stages:
1) Problem definition for rehabilitation specialists of post-traumatic paralysis patients.
2) A week of full-time work involving to the whole population of biomedical engineering students and the faculty. In the intermediate stages of this process exist daily meetings with the rehabilitation specialists. The resulting projects were evaluated at the end of this week in order to select the best prototypes in terms of feasibility for further development.
3) The remaining weeks of the semester, senior students carried out further development of the selected prototypes, testing and debugging.
4) The closure activity was a proof of concept in the context of a therapy session with a patient.

The key elements of this case included observation of the rehabilitation process of post-traumatic paralysis patients with spinal injury leads to detect possible challenges and improvement areas and the facilities of the university provided the needed infrastructure for these learning activities.

Finally, the aligned efforts of all the above mentioned entities allowed the development of 15 different prototypes at the end of the first week of development, which demonstrated a diversity of solution approaches to problems about the same issue. After evaluation, a selection of three prototypes were further developed, ending up with one prototype that successfully accomplished the addressed problem.

Keywords:

Biomedical engineering, open innovation, product design.