Relationship between Biomedical Engineering and Metrology for Project Development

Abstract

Nowadays, inter disciplinarity is a common characteristic in many work fields leading to the creation of work teams with the capacity of performing their duties and collaborating with people from other areas of study. The aim of this project is to remark the importance of the linking between Metrology and Biomedical Engineering (BE), so the combination of both fields can enlarge the useful life of medical devices by developing new methods and technologies to provide preventive maintenance and calibration of biomedical equipment. Since medical staff hugely depends on device measurements and displays, it creates a bigger uncertainty that only a team familiar with both metrology and biomedical knowledge can work on. For this, an important linking on BE undergraduate and graduate students along with a Calibration Laboratory is formed to achieve the demanding projects from health industry. To quantify and qualify the interest and knowledge of BE students, a total of 40 students were surveyed on a period of 5 days. Promising results were shown regarding on good basic knowledge of metrology concepts and encouraging interest by 60% of students. With these results, we can assure most students are willing to learn about metrology applied in the health industry for their consideration that it would bring a better and accurate performance of medical devices. Results showed a 65% of interest on including courses about metrology in their career curriculum. ETALONS -Calibration Laboratory- has already begun to recruit undergraduate students for the opportunity of internships, as well as participating along with Tecnológico de Monterrey (ITESM) for seminaries, congress conferences, metrology workshops, etc. On the other hand, seeing the promising interest of BE students for metrology, ETALONS has decided to propose a topic course for the BE curriculum on metrology focused on health industry as well as a project for the Innovation Week (Semana i) that ITESM carries out every year internally. According to this activities, students can have the convenience to learn, work and apply their knowledge on a company specialized on metrology and calibration services with a special department focused on BE.