BME 3030 - Measurement and Instrumentation in Biomedical Engineering

Fall. 3 credits. Letter grades only.

Prerequisite: BME 2010, BME 2310. Permission required if pre-requisites not met.

C. Schaffer.

This course aims to help students develop the mindset and skills necessary to produce high-quality measurements of a physiological or biological variable. The emphasis will be on helping students develop a broad perspective on biological and biomedical measurement, including carefully identifying the variables that should be measured to quantify a physiological or biological function, determining an approach to measuring that variable that includes tradeoffs of different approaches and integrates sensor design, designing a system to make the measurement with appropriate controls and calibrations, taking high quality data, processing this data and determining the accuracy and precision of the measurement and the degree to which it reflects the underlying biological or physiological function, and finally interpreting the measurements and describing how they could be used for research or diagnostic purposes. The course will build through increasingly open-ended measurement problems. Examples that emphasize mechanically, electrically, chemically, and optically-based measurements will be explored.