Voice of the Customer Videos: An Educational Tool to Identify Unmet Clinical Needs and Develop Empathy for Medical...

Empathy and incorporation of the voice of the customer (VoC) are important elements of the medical device design process, particularly when defining unmet needs and design criteria. However, limited approaches, beyond clinical immersion, have been described to teach biomedical engineering students these skills. Clinical immersion programs struggle with scalability. Our goals are to help students learn, through an accessible format, how to identify unmet clinical needs and develop design inputs that consider user needs, increase students' empathy for users of medical devices, and foster course engagement.

To introduce biomedical engineering students to VoC in a scalable way, we recorded interviews with patients, clinicians, and researchers who use medical devices. We refer to these interviews as "VoC videos." In this paper, we describe our process to create these VoC videos. We measured their efficacy through direct assessments of student work, pre- and post-course survey data, and focus groups with students.

37 VoC videos have been created and used across multiple years of a biomedical engineering course. We found that 1) students can use the VoC videos to inform their development of need statements and design inputs, 2) the VoC videos help students develop empathy for users of medical devices, and 3) the VoC videos foster engagement in course content.

The VoC videos serve as an effective educational tool to support student engagement, empathy, and design skills. The videos are available online for others to use, demonstrating scalability.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s43683-025-00206-5.