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Biomedical Engineering Education

Biomedical Engineering Education - Poster Session E

Poster Q15 - Integrating Value-Sensitive Design in a Core Undergraduate Biomedical Engineering Course: A Case Study Towards Reducing Healthcare Disparities

Saturday, October 26, 2024

10:00 AM - 11:00 AM EST

Location: Exhibit Hall E, F & G

Presenting Author(s)

Marianne Al Haj

Biomedical Engineering Student
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, Georgia, United States

Primary Investigator(s)

Maysam Nezafati, PhD (he/him/his)

Senior Lecturer
Georgia Institute of Technology / Emory University
Atlanta, Georgia, United States

Introduction: In a world of exacerbating challenges where new threats can emerge by the day, healthcare disparities remain a central concern. Healthcare disparities are population-specific differences that manifest in unequal access to medical services, differences in treatment quality, and varied health outcomes [1]. One effort to reduce them is the integration of Value-Sensitive Design (VSD) principles into the education of biomedical engineering and medical sciences. Value-Sensitive Design is a theoretical and methodical approach to the design of technology that puts the consideration of human values as an essential part of the process in a principled and systematic manner [2]. VSD comes as a response to the recognized need for increased diversity and inclusion in engineering education and in the engineering workforce. Engineers hold the responsibility of developing technologies that will impact, in a way or another, human lives – which is why non-inclusive product design can further exacerbate disparities when they fail to consider the diverse needs of all user groups. To address these challenges, VSD puts human values at the center of the design process, an essential step to ensure that innovation goes in hand with equitability and inclusivity. Thus, introducing VSD in an educational curriculum of biomedical engineers and the larger medical professionals’ society will offer them frequent learning opportunities to practice adopting an inclusive mindset in their personal interactions as well as in their engineering analytical problem-solving and design practices [3,4,5].

Materials and

Methods: To put things in context, we have conducted a large literature analysis where we examined biases in healthcare, explored various applications, and reviewed suggested action plans. Our findings highlight the increased awareness about healthcare disparities and the urgent need to address biases through comprehensive and inclusive approach.
Our work focuses on reducing disparities by tackling the educational stream. We have been implementing an intervention since Fall 2020 in a core, required biomedical engineering class. All the data collection and research activities in this research project have been approved by the Institutional Review Board in the Georgia Institute of Technology. The goal of the intervention is to raise students’ awareness of the existence of many non-inclusive designs in healthcare and value creation through a combination of individual and team-based projects.
This multi-step intervention requires students to find existing problems in healthcare, use their engineering skills to suggest solutions, and write stories to foster empathy. The steps can be categorized into three different phases: Brainstorming, Personal Experience Story, and the Case Study & Proposal.
In our analysis, we identified the “neglected stakeholder”, source of bias, and possible correlation of the latter with ethnicity, gender, age, and/or physiological and social differences. After data collection, we have conducted calculations to establish the statistical relevance of our findings.

Results, Conclusions, and Discussions: Overall, students explored various design areas such as medical devices, treatments, drugs, algorithms, and processes within several medical fields including orthopedics, dental care, cardiology, and more. Almost 52% of them identified bias related to race and ethnicity, 37% to sex and gender, 8% to social and physician status, and 4% to age-related disparities. Finally, sex, gender and race influenced the character of the stakeholder: Female and White students often highlighted social and physical differences whereas male students and students of color presented an equal number of stakeholder biases across all categories. Finally, 73% of students chose project topics based on personal or peer experiences with bias, demonstrating the impact of teamwork and storytelling [3,4,5].
Although a work in progress, the intervention fostered inclusivity by making students more aware of non-inclusive healthcare designs and promoting the creation of equitable solutions by prioritizing human values in the design process. In our project-based intervention, the learning objectives were cognitive (through enhancing the Entrepreneurial Mindset) and affective (by empathizing with storytelling).
Diversity of the student body fosters rich interactions and experiences. A homogenous student demographic may inadvertently narrow the scope of identified biases.
Considering Value-Sensitive Design as a core component of the educational experience is, therefore, necessary at a larger scale, across different colleges and a continuous assessment of engineers’ as they enter the workforce can provide even more significant insights into the work done and broaden its impact.

Acknowledgements (Optional):

References:
[1] Riley WJ. Health disparities: gaps in access, quality and affordability of medical care. Trans Am Clin Climatol Assoc. 2012;123:167-72; discussion 172-4. PMID: 23303983; PMCID: PMC3540621
[2] About VSD. VSD Lab. (2024, May 17). https://vsdesign.org/vsd/#Tools
[3] M. Nezafati, S. Schley and J. M. Le Doux, "Responsible innovation in biomedical engineering: a value sensitive design intervention," 2022 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), Uppsala, Sweden, 2022, pp. 1-8, doi: 10.1109/FIE56618.2022.9962507.
[4] Nezafati, Maysam, et al. "WIP: Integration of Inclusive Mindset in a Middle-Year Biomedical Engineering Course: a Study Over Healthcare Disparities via Story-Driven Learning." 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access. 2021.
[5] Nezafati, Maysam, M. Chua, and J. M. LeDoux. "Work in progress: A case study of integrating inclusive engineering skills into a middle-years biomedical engineering course via model-based reasoning." ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, Conference Proceedings. Vol. 2020. 2020.