BE 438 Medical Device Usability
This in-person course presents fundamental concepts of medical device usability, leveraging insights from multiple disciplines that are essential to understanding user requirements, formulating usability goals, device evaluation, and recommendations for redesign. A portion of medical errors are those that arise from the use of technology in medical care. An increasing amount of technology and technological equipment is used in medical care and the technology becomes increasingly complex each year. Evaluating and predicting patient safety in medical device use is critical for developing interventions to reduce adverse events and medical errors either by redesigning the devices, or if redesign is not an option, by training the users on the identified trouble spots in the devices. The curriculum represents an interdisciplinary program that prepares students for practice in their emerging profession through a course sequence that emphasizes theory, practical applications, and research. The course includes core topics from biomedical engineering, industrial engineering, cognitive psychology and others. Pulling these pieces together ensures a comprehensive approach to medical device design and evaluation to optimize usability, reduce costs, and ensure efficiency. Students will engage is a semester long project to evaluate a medical device of their choice to include recommendations and potential redesign based on the concepts introduced in this course
Cross Listed Courses
BE 438 & BE 538
Prerequisite
Open to Biomedical Engineering undergraduate students