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A Single Platform to Teach Circuit Design, Bioinstrumentation, Control & Signal Processing in Biomedical Engineering

Traditional Biomedical Engineering programs use multiple software platforms to teach biomedical engineering concepts in circuit design, bioinstrumentation, control and signal processing. As a result, the students spend a lot of time learning the different tools instead of learning the concepts. With the evolution of graphical programming tools, it is now possible to provide a single graphical platform that spans all facets of engineering such as circuit design, data acquisition, instrument control, control systems, digital signal processing and senior design. This results in the students spending much less time learning different tools and more time learning and implementing the concepts in a hands-on environment. In this paper, we will outline and explain the different components and advantages of such an Integrated Biomedical Engineering Platform. We will also show example implementation of such an integrated graphical platform in areas such as Bioinstrumentation and Circuit Design

1. Introduction In the rapidly changing field of Biomedical Engineering (BME), there is a continual challenge to teach concepts from an ever-increasing set of courses that span curricula from multiple disciplines. For example, a typical BME program[1,2,3] today overlaps with the courses from electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and the sciences. However, the time period to cover all the concepts is still the same as before which presents the challenge to find ways to be efficient with the time spent learning tools versus learning concepts. With graphical programming tools evolving rapidly in the past few years, it is now possible to have a single platform that can span multiple courses and senior design projects. In this paper, we will illustrate the use of graphical programming platforms to teach concepts across multiple courses, with an example from bioinstrumentation and circuit design.

2. Tool-fatigue One of the most significant challenges that educators face today in teaching different courses from different domains is the use of multiple tools. For example, students may use one tool for design and simulation of their algorithm, while they may need to rewrite their application to suit another tool for deployment in a design project. For example, most universities ask students to use one tool for data acquisition(LabVIEW) and another for the signal processing(Matlab®) and yet another tool to deploy to hardware(Xilinx tools). The challenge with this approach is that students end up spending the majority of their time learning new tools and less time on actually learning the concepts. This leads to what can be referred to as “Tool-fatigue”, where the student knows many tools but not enough domain knowledge to know how to solve the problems with the right approach. Tool-fatigue affects biomedical engineering more than other disciplines because of the overlap between other disciplines – A BME student needs to learn not only tools from the Electrical engineering domain, but also from mechanical engineering and from the sciences.

In addition, BME students generally do not have extensive experience with textual programming languages such as C and C++. Hence, the degree of learning is higher when it comes to learning text-based languages that require extensive programming expertise. This is where innovative

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Sharad, S. (2007, June), A Single Platform To Teach Circuit Design, Bioinstrumentation, Control & Signal Processing In Biomedical Engineering Paper presented at 2007 Annual Conference & Exposition, Honolulu, Hawaii. 10.18260/1-2--2430