Managing new directions for a 38 year old undergraduate BME program

The Biomedical Engineering curricula in general must reflect the state of the art in the technology related to medicine and health care, as students who graduate from these programs are directly related to the well-being of the patients, either through new devices and technologies being invented or through the application of their technical knowledge in the service industry. At present, there are more than 25 BME undergraduate programs in Mexico. Most of them are oriented towards the instrumentation and clinical engineering branches of the field, while a few others have strong components in signal analysis. The program at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM) is one of the oldest and has been used as a reference by most other programs. Since UAM is one of the top three research universities in the country, it is well poised to incorporate its research directions into a more modern curriculum. This paper deals with the efforts that have been carried out in order to minimize the excessive influence of the electrical engineering subjects in the BME undergraduate curriculum and the approaches to reach consensus-based decisions to explore new directions related to emerging disciplines in medical technology and health care. After analysis of the current state, a discussion on future directions is presented.