What Happened to the Engineering in Bioengineering?

Abstract

Part of the primary motto of this journal is to provide engineering approaches to enhance the power of the scientific method. The engineering approach is essentially the engineering design process. The scientific method is similar but is hypothesis driven vs. design driven. The issue is too often a paper written by a bioengineer is not that different from one written by a bioscientist. It boils down to whether the engineering design process is used or not. In reality, even bioscience papers that claim a better treatment should use the engineering design process. For most medical treatments the actual problem is typically inadequate return of a specific amount of function in a given timeframe. Too often the paper is about proving a statistically significant improvement of something that can affect the actual problem (proving the hypothesis) without showing how this change is enough to allow solving the problem. The paper, however, will then claim that the change shown will lead to a better clinical result and is therefore preferred over the current treatment and should be used or claiming a pre-clinical proof of concept to allow moving on to a clinical trial. If it goes to a clinical trial, it most likely will prove the hypothesis, improve clinical outcome, but not likely solve the actual problem.