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What is biomedical engineering?
Biomedical engineering applies engineering to medicine and the human body. Biomedical engineers design, build, test, maintain and improve the technology used to diagnose, monitor and treat patients.
The short answer
Engineering, physiology and the patient, in one field.
Biomedical engineering (BME) brings together physics, electronics, mechanics, materials, software and physiology. Its work ends at a patient: a scanner that makes an image, a ventilator that delivers a breath, an implant that restores movement.
What makes the field hard to learn is that the degree often teaches these parts separately. The connections are the point: physiology into devices, physics into imaging, signals into diagnosis.
What it covers
The main areas of biomedical engineering.
Therapeutic devices
How pacemakers, pumps and ventilators treat the body.
Medical imaging and imaging physics
The physics behind X-ray, ultrasound, CT and MRI, and how each scanner builds a picture of the inside of the body.
Device design
Turning a clinical need into a safe, working medical device.
Neuro-engineering
Interfaces that read and stimulate the nervous system.
Prosthetics and rehabilitation engineering
Artificial limbs that restore movement, and technology that helps patients regain function.
Clinical engineering
Keeping a hospital's medical equipment safe and working: maintenance, procurement, commissioning and patient safety.
Where biomedical engineers work
Hospitals, device companies and universities.
- Hospitals. Clinical engineering departments keep the fleet of medical devices safe and working: planned maintenance, repairs, procurement, installation and commissioning, and investigations when something goes wrong.
- Device companies, distributors and service organisations. Engineers design, sell, install and service devices. A field engineer who understands how a device fits clinical workflows, how it fails and how the hospital procures it earns clinical trust.
- Universities and research. Teaching the next engineers and developing new devices and methods.
- Regulation and quality. Risk management, standards, tenders, import and export: the work around every device.
Biomedical or clinical engineering?
Two names, one field.
Biomedical engineering is the whole field, from research and device design to the hospital. Clinical engineering is the part of it that works inside healthcare: managing medical equipment over its life, from buying it to taking it out of service, and making sure it is safe for patients and staff. See clinical engineering careers.
Start with the devices
Every engineer meets these devices.
How each one works, its common faults, its checks and its FDA recalls, on ai.bmessentia.com:
How BMEssentia teaches it
The whole degree, connected.
The BMEssentia Platform has 22 courses where each one feeds the next, and a Device Library of 69 medical devices, each broken down in the same 13 sections, from the physics inside it to the ethics around it. Medical City puts the same 69 devices in a 3D hospital, and Essentia answers questions about them from named sources.
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