Biomedical Engineering Stevens Institute of Technology Arthur B. Ritter, Ph.D., FAIMBE

2013 BME-IDEA – Seattle, WA Program Elements Our BME program has a 2 semester sequence of required undergraduate classes in Senior Design. These are part of an 8 semester Design sequence in the Engineering School. The senior design classes were program specific until 2 years ago. –A pilot program of interdisciplinary senior design projects was introduced with students from BME, EE, ECE, CE and ME participating in the interdisciplinary groups. –It was successful and was continued this year with more interdisciplinary design projects

2013 BME-IDEA – Seattle, WA Novel Features Dedicated design faculty from the participating disciplines are assigned to the interdisciplinary sections and act as academic advisors. In addition to academic advisors, each team also has an external clinical advisor from a Hospital, Medical School or Biotech company whose expertise is consistent with the project. –The interdisciplinary senior design section is coordinated by a senior instructor with over 15 years of industrial design experience in Biotech. –All potential projects are vetted by the participating faculty so that suitable academic and clinical advisors are available. –These (volunteer) external clinical advisors communicate with teams by about once a week or when advice is needed and meet with the team members about once a month to report progress or discuss design options.

2013 BME-IDEA – Seattle, WA Best Practices Except where a company sponsors a project, any IP that comes out of the project is the property of the student team members. Student teams have to design, build and test their designs. They must also display their devices at the Stevens annual Senior Design day, where all senior designs in the school of engineering are exhibited and the public is invited. At senior design day, an independent set of judges views all the projects and awards prizes for the top 3 designs with an emphasis on commercialization of the design. –For the past several years, the BME senior design teams have won the top prize in the competition. All design teams have to write and file a provisional patent application for their project as part of the deliverables. This also means a patent search for similar devices and defining any novel features of their design. All design teams must prepare a poster for their design and present it at the annual Northeast Bioengineering conference.

2013 BME-IDEA – Seattle, WA Outcomes Over the past 10 years, 6 full patents have been awarded to student design teams. Based on these patents, 2 startup companies have been formed by the students and received startup funds to manufacture prototypes for commercialization. –Both these devices also required writing proposals to an IRB for approval for human testing. Over the past 5 years, our BME senior design teams have won state-wide and international poster competitions at the NEBEC and from the International Society of Pharmaceutical Engineering (ISPE).