(D-122) Understanding an engineer’s role in global health through an interdisciplinary, human-centered design project

Introduction:: As the world becomes more connected and awareness of global injustices rises, engineering students have become increasingly interested in the intersection of engineering and global health. Despite this interest, many engineering students have not been exposed to the key ethical considerations needed to take on these design challenges. To address this, we created a course titled ‘Tech Design for Global Health’ which aimed to improve each student’s ability to understand the relationship between global health and engineering and fully immerse themselves in a place-based, human-centered design process. In developing this class, our goal was to create a curriculum that would prepare students from all majors with the knowledge needed to think critically about the oppressive roots of global health, furthering their ability to effectively design solutions in partnership with a specific community. In most design classes, students are not able to interact with end-users and stakeholders while solving a real-world problem. Particularly where global health meets engineering, teaching anti-oppressive praxis in design classes is crucial. In this course, undergraduate students at Duke University learned about the history of global health and worked to understand the unique cultural and physical context for their selected design challenge. Students got hands-on experience trying to put these lessons into practice by designing and building prototypes for partners in Peru.

Materials and Methods:: Funding to develop this course was awarded to Kerry Eller through the Bass Connections Collaborative Projects Expeditions Grant at Duke University. All levels of undergraduate students across all majors were eligible to enroll in BME 290L: Tech Design for Global Health. The pilot implementation of this course was taught in Fall of 2022 and focused on design challenges surrounding women’s health. Our existing partners at Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, a cancer center in Lima, Peru, provided students with a design challenge. The course was broken into discussion and lab segments, each meeting once a week. On Tuesdays, students had required readings which were discussed during class, alongside an activity on topics ranging from the history of global health and colonialism to the fundamentals of a design matrix. Thursday sections were lab sections, focused on building design and prototyping skills. A vital component of this community-centered design course was that students were able to interact with, interview, and receive feedback from partners in Peru at multiple times throughout the semester. This framework was designed to help students identify the inequitable roots of global health while thinking critically about building sustainable solutions through the human-centered design framework.

Students completed both midterm and final reflections which asked them to analyze their learning experiences in the class through a series of guided questions. Direct content analysis was used to deductively evaluate the reflection data with predetermined codes based on the objectives of the class in NVivo v12.


Results, Conclusions, and Discussions:: Results: Five students from three majors (3 biomedical engineering, 1 biology, and 1 public policy) enrolled during the Fall 2022 semester. 100% of students reflected that they learned about the role of oppression in global health, and that this awareness directly contributed to their ability to work on their design (27 instances in reflections). All students mentioned that interactions with partners were vital to the design process (25 instances), and that having an interdisciplinary team of engineers and non-engineers was helpful (23 instances). 100% of students also reflected that the way they view the role of engineers had changed because of the class. For example, students felt they grew to understand the social role of engineers in shaping social and political agendas through their innovations (14 instances), and the need to work in collaboration with community members to ensure efficacious solutions (11 instances). This course was novel to all students, as none had taken a class with both a design and global health aspect.

Conclusions: Despite the small sample size, the goals of the course seem to be achieved according to the students’ reflections. Students learned the value of place-based design and understanding the historical context for a problem in a specific community. They also grew to understand that community members are the experts on the problems they face and are best positioned to set priorities and give feedback throughout the design process. This made most students realize the need to work in collaboration with those community members and take on the challenge of engineering in a social context. Students from all backgrounds learned from one another to grow skill sets in background research, stakeholder involvement, and prototyping. Student reflections will be used to improve future sections of this course. For example, future sections may source local problems as design challenges to build a sense that global health starts locally.

Discussions: With a collaborative project driven by global partnerships and human-centered design at the core of this course, the content of this course allowed students to build solutions that better unite theory, application, and reflection through a global lens.


Acknowledgements (Optional): : Thank you to the Bass Connections Collaborative Project Expeditions Grant for supporting the development of this course.

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