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With increasing challenges to health care in the foreseeable future, novel technology solutions are increasingly needed. Meanwhile, biomedical engineers are increasingly asked to develop user-centered solutions (i.e., desired by the end users). Nevertheless, the importance of user-centeredness is often neglected in the innovation process. It remains unclear about the interplay between thinking of solution novelty and desirability in addition to feasibility, and thus it is challenging for biomedical engineering educators to balance the teaching of the above two aspects in a BME design curriculum. This study aims to develop a preliminary version of a user-centered innovation potential assessment instrument applicable to diverse biomedical engineering design projects. The assessment instrument was adapted from File and Purzer (2014)’s definition of innovation potential (1) feasibility (2) viability (3) desirability and (4) novelty. Among these aspects, we focused on assessing feasibility, desirability and novelty, which can be quantified and assigned to each design idea proposed by the students. As the first attempt, we targeted students’ innovation potential in the design prototyping phase. To validate our preliminary development, we gave an in-class design task for smart pill dispenser to 30+ pairs of senior students enrolled in the BME capstone design course. To assess the design ideas, the instructor and his teaching assistant (two of the authors on the paper) applied a thematic analysis. We first identified patterns from the submitted design ideas by extracting key attributes including dispenser’s portability, tracking/reminding capability, safety, and easy to use. We then estimated the frequency and novelty of these key attributes appearing in each design idea and converted each of them to a 5-point scale. Finally, we calculated a composite score for user-centered innovation potential by multiplying the scales on feasibility, desirability and novelty. We believe this study has added value to improving our understanding of user-centered innovation potential in an undergraduate biomedical engineering curriculum. With further development and scaled-up validation, we may be able to use the instrument to provide insights into developing teaching interventions for stimulating user-centered innovative potentials among biomedical engineers. 

In the innovation process, design practice involves multiple iterations of framing and reframing under high levels of uncertainty and ambiguity. Additionally, as user desirability is a significant criterion for innovative design, designers' empathy in the framing and reframing process is considered a critical user-centered design ability that engineering students should develop. In this context, this study aims to discuss how problem framing and empathy manifestation interplay in the innovation process. As an exploratory study, this study investigates biomedical engineering (BME) students’ reframing processes and decisions in a one-semester design project involving problem definition and concept identification. This investigation is guided by the following research questions: 1) how do engineering students perceive the relationship between empathy and reframing in the innovation process, 2) how and how often do they make reframing decisions over the stages of problem definition and concept identification, and 3) how different are reframing processes and decisions between teams with higher and lower empathetic design tendency scores? This study was conducted in a junior-level design course, including 76 BME students. We collected and analyzed three data sources: students’ self-reflection reports about their reframing processes, empathic design tendency score, and interviews with selected teams and instructors. The results demonstrated that more than half of the students perceived the connection between empathy and their reframing decisions and that they usually had one reframing moment in the stages of problem definition and concept identification. Also, the findings illustrate triggers for their reframing moments, information sources guiding their reframing processes, changes made through reframing, and influences of reframing decisions on team project processes. Furthermore, the comparison of the selected two teams revealed two differences in reframing processes between the high and low empathic design tendency-scoring teams. The authors believe that the study expands engineering education research on engineering students’ empathy and problem-framing by illustrating students’ reframing processes throughout a design project and exploring the interplay of empathy and reframing processes. Also, based on our study findings, engineering design educators can promote student empathy development by including more project activities and evaluation criteria related to empathic design and providing formative feedback on their reframing processes. 

One of the aims of biomedical engineering is to facilitate the development of innovative technologies to address socioeconomic challenges in healthy living and independent aging. Realizing such innovations requires empathy, agility, and creativity. This project aims to support the professional development of a competent biomedical engineer workforce that can effectively accomplish emphatic innovation, and one that can frame and re-frame problems through the innovation process. Our research examined how engineering students empathize with users and develop empathic abilities that have implications on their design innovation skills. The project team developed empathic innovation workshops and embedded them into existing biomedical engineering capstone courses. Data were collected using surveys, student project reports, ideation tasks, and observations. These workshops resulted in significant changes in students’ emphatic tendencies. From our qualitative studies, we also conjectured that the overall empathic potency of a student design team helped facilitate problem re-framing based on user input. These findings contribute to the literature on the critical role of innovation behaviors in relationship to empathic design tendencies in the context of biomedical engineering, as well as suggest instructional practices designed to promote empathy, agility, and creativity.