BME 2.0: Engineering the Future of Medicine.

If the 20th century was the age of mapping and controlling the external world, the 21st century is the biomedical age of mapping and controlling the biological internal world. The biomedical age is bringing new technological breakthroughs for sensing and controlling human biomolecules, cells, tissues, and organs, which underpin new frontiers in the biomedical discovery, data, biomanufacturing, and translational sciences. This article reviews what we believe will be the next wave of biomedical engineering (BME) education in support of the biomedical age, what we have termed BME 2.0. BME 2.0 was announced on October 12 2017 at BMES 49 (https://www.bme.jhu.edu/news-events/news/miller-opens-2017-bmes-annual-meeting-with-vision-for-new-bme-era/). We present several principles upon which we believe the BME 2.0 curriculum should be constructed, and from these principles, we describe what view as the foundations that form the next generations of curricula in support of the BME enterprise. The core principles of BME 2.0 education are (a) educate students bilingually, from day 1, in the languages of modern molecular biology and the analytical modeling of complex biological systems; (b) prepare every student to be a biomedical data scientist; (c) build a unique BME community for discovery and innovation via a vertically integrated and convergent learning environment spanning the university and hospital systems; (d) champion an educational culture of inclusive excellence; and (e) codify in the curriculum ongoing discoveries at the frontiers of the discipline, thus ensuring BME 2.0 as a launchpad for training the future leaders of the biotechnology marketplaces. We envision that the BME 2.0 education is the path for providing every student with the training to lead in this new era of engineering the future of medicine in the 21st century.

Erratum to "BME 2.0: Engineering the Future of Medicine".

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.34133/bmef.0001.].

The Do-It-Yourself Electrocardiogram.

Hands-on labs are a critical component of biomedical engineering undergraduate education. Due to both the pandemic and the growing interest in online education, we developed a Do-it-yourself Electrocardiogram (DIY EKG) project. The Arduino-based DIY EKG kit instructed students how to build a circuit to obtain their own EKG and then analyze their EKG data using Matlab. Despite the obstacles of virtually trouble-shooting, 85.4% of students (n = 103) were able to obtain their own EKG at home. We have provided the labelled circuit drawings, step-by-step instructions, Matlab files, and results in this paper. Survey results indicate that 89% of students felt the DIY EKG project was a "challenging yet fulfilling experience." Supplementary Information: The online version of this article contains supplementary material available 10.1007/s43683-021-00061-0.

Improving Biomedical Engineering Undergraduate Learning Through Use of Online Graduate Engineering Courses During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

In order to provide undergraduate students with a full, rich online learning experience we adapted pre-existing online content including graduate courses from Johns Hopkins University Engineering for Professionals (JHU EP) program. These online courses were designed using published methodologies and held to a high level of rigor of a Masters-level curriculum. Adapting pre-existing online course material enabled us to more rapidly adapt to the COVID-19 shutdown of in-person education. We adapted content to meet the majority of lab-based learning objectives rather than generating self-recorded lecture material and allowing us to focus faculty time on addressing student needs. Here we discuss benefits, challenges, and methods for replicating these courses, and lessons to be applied in future offerings from this experience.

Moving a Team-Based Freshmen Biomedical Engineering and Design Course Online.

Team projects and in-class interactions are the hallmark of a freshmen introductory course in biomedical engineering (BME). Our challenge was to continue team activities, mentoring, and the semester-long design project in a virtual environment after in-person classes ended due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper highlights some of the adaptations required to continue a large (n = 124) team-based course with students located throughout the world. Breaking up planned in-class activities into small individual assignments followed by team meetings gave groups a starting point for their discussions. Mentoring panels with upperclassmen were actually enhanced through the inclusion of alumni in a virtual environment. The end-of-semester anonymous survey results indicate that 81% of the freshmen agreed or strongly agreed that the course objectives were met, and 75% believed that the team assignments were useful learning experiences. In spite of the sudden shift to online learning, we were able to continue with both short-term and semester-long team activities.

Redefining classroom instruction.

In this study, the role of the classroom instructor was redefined from a "lecturer" responsible for delivering the core curriculum to a "facilitator" at the center of an active learning environment. Web-based lectures were used to provide foundation content to students outside of the classroom, which made it possible to improve the quality of student-faculty contact time in the classroom. Students reported that this hybrid format of instruction afforded them a better understanding of the content, a higher probability of retaining the content, and the opportunity to spend more time thinking about the application of the content compared with more traditional lecture-based methods of instruction.