Master of engineering program in biomedical engineering at Cornell University: Collaboration with external sponsors to prove concepts in assistive devices

Abstract

As a biomedical engineer, one seldom gets the opportunity to help patients return to health in areas in which the magnitude of the need, or the adoption of the approach, is unproven. Returning to my alma mater, Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in late 2004, I was given the opportunity to coordinate the master of engineering program in biomedical engineering. Teaching students about the biomedical engineering arts and the Food and Drug Administration environment, and using projects proposed by external companies and physicians, we began to build a new Department of Biomedical Engineering. Professor Michael Shuler, our chairman, has had a distinguished career in chemical engineering. After a long process, he established a new program in biomedical engineering as part of the College of Engineering. The scientific orientation for the department is to understand disease mechanisms from a molecules-to-man perspective. Our engineering strategy was to develop a 1-year master of engineering program with an engineering project as the focal experience. Real projects are a demanding first experience and permit an engineering student to learn four key dimensions: How to-- 1. Understand customer needs. 2. Reduce needs to a concept and design. 3. Fabricate and test the design. 4. Deliver a documented prototype that can be reproduced. As the Program Coordinator, I solicit student-appropriate projects from sponsors that are presented to the students each year. Most projects are with my Cornell colleagues in their respective research laboratories. The remainder are with external sponsors. Early on, I realized we needed an exemption from University policy concerning intellectual property. With help from corporate and foundation relations in the College, we were permitted an exemption, primarily because our master of engineering students are not employees and pay full tuition for our program. External sponsors have been companies and individual physicians hoping to develop a prototype of a clinical concept. Remarkably, several of these have been in assistive technologies and surgical systems, including-- * A lower-cost stroke rehabilitation system. * An assisted walker. * A blink restoration device. Clients pay no fee for work performed on the project, but we do ask for reimbursement of direct expenses, such as student travel, etc. STROKE REHABILITATION SYSTEM Bruce T. Volpe, Professor of Neurology & Neuroscience from the Burke Rehabilitation Hospital in White Plains, New York, came to Ithaca to present a seminar (to our master of engineering students) on his work with Neville Hogan and H. I. Krebs on a robotic system for stroke rehabilitation that had remarkable results. After the seminar, we discussed a concept for a portable and lightweight system that could be used on a kitchen table as an alternative to his Massachusetts Institute of Technology-Weill Robot. With the help and laboratory space provided by Professor Andy Ruina, Professor of Mechanics in Mechanical Engineering, four enthusiastic students signed up for the project. After serious effort, the project met with technical difficulties centering on the need to secure the position of the patient with respect to the device (reported in their master of engineering project report, Home recovery robotic device for hemiparetic stroke patients, by Ian Colahan, Derek Stillwell, and Paula Wang, Cornell University, May 11, 2007). Even with the difficulty, the project had an upside. A doctor of philosophy (PhD) student, Michael A. Sherback, was not only a great resource to the team, he used his knowledge of oscillators and his keen ability to build a prototype of a novel and usable device that was relatively lightweight and could be portable (Figure 1) [1]. We used our college infrastructure and a grant to Volpe and Sherback from Cornell's Clinical Translational Science Center Program to fabricate additional prototypes. …