New Dimensions in Designing Medical Devices

Harvey Mudd College and the CIMIT consortium institutions are a continent apart, but a CIMIT Forum on March 18 demonstrated that creative ideas can develop when innovative minds can be brought together.

The event was held at the Simches Research Center of Massachusetts General Hospital, and one of the featured presenters was Clive Dym, PhD, PE, who is Fletcher Jones Professor of Engineering Design at Harvey Mudd College, based in Claremont, CA.

Dr. Dym’s session was moderated by William Wiesmann, MD, founder, chairman and CEO of BioSTAR Group. Dr. Dym said that he heard dynamic and promising ideas for developing medical devices during the two-hour event.

Dr. Dym described the design experiences of his college's broad-based, general engineering curriculum. A major element of the HMC engineering  program is a three-semester “capstone’ experience in which students work on design or development projects sponsored by industry, national laboratories or government agencies.

Also presenting was Steven Rauch, MD, associate professor of otology and laryngology, at Harvard Medical School, who is with the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, where he is director of the MEEI Balance Center.

Moderating this session was Alexander Slocum, PhD, professor of mechanical engineering and MacVicar Faculty Fellow at MIT.

Dr. Rauch noted that falls are the fifth leading cause of death among the elderly, and close to 9 percent of those over 65 have balance problems. In mentioning young patients, he said many veterans of the Iraq war have sustained head injuries, and consequently have sought therapy for challenges in maintaining their balance.

One of his objectives is to develop an Ambulatory Vestibular Monitor (AVM) to record voluntary and reflexive eye movements, and other physiologic parameters. Ultimately, the AVM can be used as an ambulatory tool monitoring the patient to aid in the diagnosis of dizzy patients. It could also be used as a “vestibular lab in a box” data record that can be combined with a test battery to enable general vestibular function testing in remote and underserved areas that do not have access to conventional vestibular diagnostic services.

A post-presentation panel included Drs. Wiesmann, Dym, Slocum, Rauch and Rajiv Gupta, MD, a radiologist at MGH. Participants said that the session had provided many new ideas about how to proceed in improving their research as it relates to developing devices to cope with poor balance and the fear of falling.

Teaching Engineering Design

According to Herb Simon, “design is the central activity of engineering.”  At most engineering schools today, science-based analysis and reductionism are taught well; but the teaching of design, which requires questioning and synthesis, is sometimes neglected.  Unlike being a good theoretician, being a good designer requires dealing with uncertainty and ambiguity.  Engineers in the real world must understand how the parts of a system interact, and they must be good estimators, capable of using both empirical and experimental knowledge in their decision-making.  Students of engineering must also realize that design is a social process requiring negotiation and the ability to balance conflicting objectives.  Mathematical knowledge alone is necessary but not sufficient.

At Harvey Mudd College, design is a critical component of the general engineering curriculum, and courses are meant to ensure that students experience team-oriented, client-driven design projects.  Freshmen take a single-semester design course that consists of a project created by the professor and a project suggested by a not-for-profit company.  The students work in teams, and the teams are shuffled between projects.  Upperclassmen participate in a three-semester design course in which teams of students complete projects for external clients.  The projects are varied and range from childproofing fuel cells to building mountings for rocket boosters.  The client company pays for the project, provides a liaison to the students, and owns the rights to any intellectual property that emerges from the project.  One third to one half of the projects result in patents being filed.  The experience of working with a team designing a product for a company gives the engineering students at Harvey Mudd a valuable glimpse of what it is like to work as a professional engineer.      

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