Design Teams
We organize our design sequence as a year-long experience in a university-based-corporation called Homewood Biomedical Design Associates (HBDA). The courses in this sequence are a project-based set, where teams of students from freshmen to seniors, and also Masters level, converge to solve practical problems in biomedical engineering solicited from faculty, industry and the local community.
A Typical Design Team
Biomedical engineering student teams are made up of one Team Leader, three to five upperclassmen, and three to five freshman (freshmen start to work on the project from spring semester only). Within HBDA, faculty and support staff serve as technical management, upperclassmen are project engineers and freshmen are new hires. Project advisors, sponsors, laboratory personnel and machinists support the course. In some cases, these teams interact with marketing teams from the Entrepreneurship and Management Program.
Teams select from specific medical device development projects submitted by sponsors and screened by faculty. In these projects, freshman students are oriented into biomedical engineering, and upperclassmen have the flexibility to make their own interpretations of loosely-defined problems to generate different - and often creative - solutions.