Designing Medical Devices for the Ear
Biomedical engineers designed this small ear tube medical device.
Students are introduced to engineering, specifically to biomedical engineering and the engineering design process, through a short lecture and an associated hands-on activity in which they design their own medical devices for retrieving foreign bodies from the ear canal. Through the lesson, they learn the basics of ear anatomy and how ear infections occur and are treated. Besides antibiotic treatment, the most common treatment for chronic ear infections is the insertion of ear tubes to drain fluid from the middle ear space to relieve pressure on the ear drum. Medical devices for this procedure, a very common children's surgery, are limited, sometimes resulting in unnecessary complications from a simple procedure. Thus, biomedical engineers must think creatively to develop new solutions (that is, new and improved medical devices/instruments) for inserting ear tubes into the ear drum. The class learns the engineering design process from this ear tube example of a medical device design problem. In the associated activity, students explore biomedical engineering on their own by designing prototype medical devices to solve another ear problem commonly experienced by children: the lodging of a foreign body (such as a pebble, bead or popcorn kernel) in the ear canal. The activity concludes by teams sharing and verbally analyzing their devices.
Students learn what biomedical engineers do and how they typically design medical device solutions. Engineers follow the steps of the engineering design process when developing new products or creating new technologies. The class goes through this same process of identifying a problem, drawing on previous knowledge (in this case, the ear anatomy and hearing), brainstorming possible solutions, picking a solution, and evaluating the prototype device as they discover how ear infections occur and what surgical measures can be taken to alleviate pain. Biomedical engineers draw on knowledge of the body as they develop devices and surgical techniques and perform testing experiments to validate, troubleshoot and iteratively improve their designs—the class will do the same as they complete the lesson and activity.
After this lesson, students should be able to:
- Identify examples of products designed by biomedical engineers.
- Describe how engineers go about solving problems.
- List the steps of the engineering design process.
- Give examples of how material learned in science or math class can be applied to engineering.