Board 19: Work in Progress: Integrating Ethics Education across the Biomedical Engineering Curriculum Increases Student Awareness of Frameworks and Broader Applications to Practice
The intersection of human health and designing novel technologies that improve medical outcomes requires personal and professional introspection on the ethical dilemmas that clinicians and engineers will face in their careers. Given the diverse field of biomedical engineering, from imaging modalities to implantable devices to emergent biotechnologies, no singular approach to ethics training will prepare our students to assess their professional obligation to the ethical, social, and legal implications of their future work. Many engineering programs provide students with early modules in engineering ethics during first-year gateway courses before reaching technical proficiency in biomedical engineering. Another strategy to incorporate ethics into the curriculum focuses on senior capstone courses with an emphasis on designing for clients and diverse stakeholders, but this approach lacks the appropriate scaffolding of ethical principles applied to engineering problems that mirrors scaffolded technical content. Accepting the broad nature of a biomedical engineering degree, we aim to engage undergraduate students in gaining proficiency and efficacy in incorporating ethical inquiry into technical knowledge that improves student engagement with course content and allows critical reflection on technical challenges for their future careers. We believe that an iterative “ethics everywhere” approach to engineering education supports students in their development and scaffolds important ethical principles in identifying ethical dilemmas and will provide value in their prospective careers. In the Biomedical Engineering undergraduate curriculum at Duke University, we have integrated topic-specific ethics modules across all levels- beginning their freshmen year with an introductory design course, continuing through three sophomore (200-level) courses, three junior (300-level) courses, and all senior design (400-level) courses. The selected courses cover breadth in the biomedical engineering field, including biomaterials, medical instrumentation, biological modeling, imaging, and biotechnology. Topics of ethical inquiry include foundational bioethics frameworks in autonomy, justice, and beneficence; virtue ethics; ethical sourcing of materials; risk analyses of medical technologies; and fairness in healthcare costs. We have developed reflection assignments on student perception of ethics in biomedical engineering that reflect increased self-efficacy and comfort with ethical inquiry. Assessments on stakeholders and perceived risk during senior design courses indicate growth in applying case studies from previous biomedical technologies to identify potential ethical dilemmas in developing and deploying a new technology. Future work will measure student self-efficacy across the BME curriculum and post-graduation in longitudinal studies on preparation for ethical decision making as professional engineers.
