Physiology concepts and physiology problems for biomedical engineering students

Physiology is a core element of an undergraduate biomedical engineering curriculum, although programs differ in whether the biomedical engineering faculty or biology faculty teach these courses, and in whether physiology is taught in stand-alone courses or incorporated into other courses. Here we first present an analysis of the concepts and topics in physiology that are viewed by biomedical engineering faculty and by representatives of industry as being most important for biomedical engineers to learn. We also provide information on the importance of other topics in biology for the biomedical engineering curriculum. Biomedical engineering students need to be able to work with quantitative aspects of physiology and need practice applying engineering concepts to physiological systems. However, many physiology texts appropriate for undergraduates avoid quantitative analysis, and provide few problems to develop the students' use of mathematics or engineering tools in the context of physiology. As a result, we have begun the development of a resource of quantitative homework problems from which individual problems can be selected and linked to any physiology course.