Teaching biomedical engineering ethics in the context of statistics

Incorporation of ethics into undergraduate biomedical engineering education requires a unique blend of engineering and biomedical ethics. We developed and integrated an ethics segment into Biomedical Computation, a required undergraduate course with strong emphasis on statistical methods. The objective of the ethics segment was to introduce basic engineering and medical ethics principles using case studies, then to provide an engineering context in which students could use these principles to construct ethical arguments and make ethical judgments. In follow-up surveys, students responded well to the case study approach, suggesting that ethics can readily be incorporated into core engineering curricula.