ABSTRACT

This chapter describes an overview of the principles of engineering-medicine. First, this chapter attempts to provide a working definition of engineering-medicine, which has not been clearly defined previously by the medical community. Then this chapter discusses the principles that characterize this new concept of engineering-medicine. The essence of engineering-medicine is to train future biomedical engineers and future physicians to “think like an engineer and act as a physician”. To think like an engineer is to think logically, to think about whole patients as an interconnected system that is fully integrated, to think innovatively, to think in terms of efficiency, to think optimally, to think like a problem-solver, to think about quality of medical outcome, to think environmental impact, and to think in terms of precision. This chapter then outlines the courses of teaching in this book that aim to achieve the teaching of these principles.