51:085 / 51:178 Biomedical Engineering Senior Design
Project Idea "Brainstorming" Guidelines

Over the next few weeks you will hear many project ideas from faculty, but you and your fellow students can come up with some great project ideas too.  The purpose of this assignment is to put together a pool of project ideas for discussion in class ("brainstorming") and to get the class thinking about projects and interacting.

See the lecture notes from "What makes a good project" lecture and the class introductory lecture for the guidelines on what makes an acceptable project.  You can look at previous year's projects here.

For this assignment you should hand in a one page project description of a potential senior design project.  You can come up with the idea yourself or get ideas from anyone else (try former students, BME faculty, other faculty, your boss, relatives, your doctor, etc.). Other good sources for project ideas might include newspaper, magazines, and other media that might discuss problems related to human health that can be solved by biomedical engineers.

IMPORTANT: You are under no obligation to pursue the project idea you submit. The project you submit will be put into a document and posted on the web so that that everyone can access it.  The document will serve as a starting point for discussion and brainstorming.  

ALSO IMPORTANT: Since the idea you submit here will become public, don't submit something that you don't wish to reveal to the class or that might be confidential or proprietary to a person, company, or other organization.  I will post your idea on the class web page (publicly accessible!), so be sure you are comfortable with all of the implications of disclosing your idea before submitting it!

Formatting:

• Electronic submission only, by email to Prof. Mackey

• First six lines:

  • Your name

  • Course number (51:085 or 51:178)

  • The sentence "I give permission for this idea to be disclosed on the class web site and discussed in class."

  • One of these two sentences:

    • "You may disclose this idea with my name attached."

    • "You must remove my name from the description before disclosing the idea."

  • Proposed project title

  • A blank line

• Two to four paragraphs of PLAIN ASCII TEXT (no word documents, no PDF files, etc.).  You can create this document in Notepad or Word, but be sure to save as plain text (TXT extension)

• You must follow these submission guidelines exactly to get credit for this assignment!

• See here for an example of how the submission should be formatted.

Content:

I suggest you structure the description of your idea in 3 to 4 paragraphs:

• Paragraph 1: What is the problem and why is it significant?  You might close this paragraph with a short (one sentence) description of an idea for a solution, but the details will come in the next paragraph.

• Paragraph 2 to 3: Describe one possible solution to the problem. In this paragraph you might also include other key facts, such as access to special equipment, financial support, or special expertise required.  Have others already solved this problem?

• Last paragraph: Summarize how your contribution meets the class project requirements (e.g., impact on human health, department outcomes, overall novelty, engineering design content, etc.)

Deadline:

The project idea must arrive by email no later than noon on Friday, Sept. 3, 2003.  The timestamp on the email will be used to establish the submission time.

Grading:

Everyone works independently on this assignment. Idea descriptions that are formatted and submitted properly, address all of the points in the "Content" section, and are submitted on-time will receive full credit.