Addressing societal challenges through graduate-level community-engaged design projects

Introduction




Biomedical engineering students typically complete design projects to solve a problem for an identified clinical population, resulting in an engineered product such as a novel medical device or new assistive technology. However, adequately addressing major societal problems (e.g., opioid addiction, mental health disorders, disability, etc.) will require more than just an engineered product or device, it will require solutions that span individual, community, and societal systems across many different disciplines. The next generation of leaders charged with addressing these complex challenges must know how to work across traditional academic disciplinary boundaries and meaningfully engage with stakeholder individuals, communities, and policy makers [1], [2].  Thus, there is a strong need to train students in the necessary research and design philosophies and skills that will best prepare them to address these complex problems across a variety of users, communities, and disciplines.




We have implemented a graduate-level training program that prepares trainees to address societal challenges beyond their own scientific discipline. Our goal is for students to gain a deep understanding of physical, physiological, environmental, and social-ecological factors that surround the issues, and develop technological solutions to overcome these barriers. A key feature of this training program is student participation in year-long community-engaged design projects, enabling them to work in multi-disciplinary teams while being immersed within the actual communities affected by these societal problems. 




The objective of this paper is to share the design of our training program and the results of our community-engaged design projects over three cohorts of students.




Materials and Methods




Our training is rooted in two complementary design philosophies: Design Thinking to provide students a human-centered approach to solve real world design problems [3], and Community-Based Participatory Research to develop intentional relationships with community partners and work together as a team in problem-solving [4].




Teams are composed of at least four graduate students from different disciplines and local community partners invested in solving big societal challenges. Over the year, these teams work to identify the specific issues and needs within their local communities based on multiple perspectives and lived experiences, formulate research questions, and engage in participatory design to develop and test ecologically-valid multi-disciplinary solutions. Students are explicitly taught how to integrate engineering, data science, and social science while meaningfully engaging with the stakeholder communities in a mutually beneficial manner. 




Students are trained by faculty from several fields (Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematical Sciences, Social Work, Education, Psychology), who offer workshops covering data science, the design cycle, minimal viable products, stakeholder interviews, community partner introductions, qualitative interviews, focus groups, and Institutional Review Board applications. Trainees develop and use both data-collection devices and data-analysis techniques to promote data-driven solutions with major social, public health, and economic consequences. At the end of the year, the teams and community partners showcase their projects to an audience of students, participants, and representatives from various local communities and agencies. 




Students receive a year of graduate funding in exchange for their participation, distributed as part of an NSF Research Traineeship program award. 




Results, Conclusions, and Discussions




Community-based participatory research is a mechanism for researchers to improve health and well-being and promote social change through taking action [5].




44 graduate students over three cohorts have completed the training program, and a new cohort of 18 students began in Summer 2023. Students came from a variety of disciplines, including engineering, psychology, neuroscience, computer science, computational data science, and social work. 




The community-engaged projects sought to address a variety of societal challenges, including: improving agency and resilience of individuals with opioid addiction in northern Virginia, connecting incarcerated individuals to reentry services, improving accessibility of mental health care to new patients, accessible navigation in public spaces for people with mobility impairments, and improving communication between patients with Parkinson’s disease and their caregivers and clinical providers. Community partners came from a variety of non-profit organizations and community advocacy groups who are now invested in continued long-term collaboration to help address these community issues.




Pre–post cohort surveys reported significant improvement in convergent research skills, community engagement, and socio-skills. Qualitative assessments described a dramatic change in how students approach their own graduate research. For example, one student reported “I would really like to start incorporating a community component to my future research projects. …It helps to take a step back and actually think about the population we are trying to help. It can be easy to get stuck in scientist mode without thinking of the wider implications of our research on society.” Another student said, “I really want to transform my research to be more community based and I definitely want to connect with stakeholders in order to develop my research questions rather than come up with them independently.” Student comments also conveyed they were better enabled to address large societal problems. For example, one student shared “For my future research I hope [to] continue this project and see it through so that more than just people in the [Washington DC] Jail would benefit from it. …It will encourage me to be more open and …recognize that small steps can be taken to make an impact.” 




Acknowledgements




Our training program is funded by the National Science Foundation Research Traineeship Award #1922598. This program is designed to encourage the development and implementation of bold, new potentially transformative models for STEM graduate education training.




References




[1]        National Research Council, Convergence: Facilitating Transdisciplinary Integration of Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, Engineering, and Beyond. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2014. doi: 10.17226/18722.




[2]        National Research Council, Enhancing the Effectiveness of Team Science. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2015. doi: 10.17226/19007.




[3]        IDEO, Ed., The field guide to human-centered design: design kit, 1st. ed. San Francisco, Calif.: Design Kit, 2015.




[4]        E. Chen, C. Leos, S. D. Kowitt, and K. E. Moracco, “Enhancing Community-Based Participatory Research Through Human-Centered Design Strategies,” Health Promotion Practice, vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 37–48, Jan. 2020, doi: 10.1177/1524839919850557.




[5]        M. Viswanathan et al., “Community‐Based Participatory Research: Assessing the Evidence: Summary,” in AHRQ Evidence Report Summaries, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (US), 2004. Accessed: Jun. 07, 2023. [Online]. Available: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK11852/