ENGINEERING IN TRANSLATION MEDICINE, A DESIGN-CENTRIC PROGRAMME APPROACH FOR ENGINEERS

One of the main tasks of tertiary engineering education is to educate and prepare future engineers on the being able to tackle the challenges ahead in their career path. There are many different approaches to achieve the above mentioned objective. Infusing the flavor of design in the curriculum could be one of the possible ways to prepare and motivate the would-be engineers for their future challenges. On this note, we have embarked on the Engineering in Translational Medicine Track in the Design-Centric Programme under the Faculty of Engineering at the National University of Singapore. The students from the various engineering departments come together to form multi-disciplinary teams to develop engineering solutions for clinical applications, under the supervision of a panel of multi-disciplinary supervisors with medical and engineering expertise.

The teams take a broad systems approach to understand the various problems and frame the problems in innovative ways, focusing on the specific goals of the various design problems. The whole duration of the project is about three years’ long. In the initial phase of the programme, the students are made to undergo an immersion module whereby the students shadow the doctors and medical staff in their areas of work. This immersion experience allows the students to get first-hand information about the problems they will tackle, from the various stakeholders. There is a steep learning curve here as the students have to understand the pertinent medical background and other surrounding medical conditions and procedures, related to the actual problem. The literature survey and market survey are usually carried concurrently at about this period of time. After this, the teams will then proceed to develop engineering solutions that will lead to innovative clinical applications for the medical sponsors and other stakeholders. Industry partners will also be introduced to the teams in the process of the development.

For pedagogy purposes, an ethnography study is done to highlight the effectiveness, strengths and weaknesses of this Engineering in Translational Medicine Track. The results have shown that there are clear signs that the track is heading in the right directions, though some minor adjustments have to be made to further accentuate and emphasize the desired learning outcomes for the students.