Addressing the need for practical exercises in biomedical engineering education for growing economies

This paper presents the ways to design low budget and high performance laboratory exercises for the purpose of biomedical engineering education. The methodology is based on "use what you have" principle, i.e. compose the BME exercise from the components available on a laboratory desk: inexpensive sensors/actuators, microcontrollers, acquisition interfaces, computers and widely used education software like MATLAB and LabVIEW. Basic and intermediate laboratory sets are elaborated and a list of the possible exercises for several BME courses is proposed, while some of them are described in detail. The quality/cost ratio shows that proposed approach can be suitable for biomedical engineering education, especially in growing economies.