Understanding human tissue properties plays a meaningful role in research and education of medical as well as engineering disciplines. Up till now, the teaching approach had been quite limited to demonstrating anatomies or calculating biomechanical properties, respectively. In both education models, room for enhanced and profound learning experiences is available. Research wise, data on human tissue properties are scarce, and if present, reported by limited statistical parameters, but certainly not location or functionality dependent parameters. The ambition is to fill the research and education gaps by developing a novel education module that uses hand-on measurements on human tissues toward enhanced learning experience while collecting high quality data for open access database. We envision to start with the development of one axial force measurement setup dedicated to tendons/ligaments, along with complementary standardized measurement protocols. The module allows UT/VU students to experience the look or feel of human tissue, perform experiments, process data, perform (bio)statistics, and report according to research standards. As a pilot, we intend to incorporate the novel module in a new course-Medical Device Prototyping, which will be an elective course for UT/VU students. Once this education module is established, we explore integration of it in other courses such as the ones that academic teaching and research skills are among the learning goals. The module itself will be scaled up with additional experimental setups (e.g. biaxial and shear forces) and tissue types. The setups are suitable for joint master assignments to compare properties of fresh frozen and embalmed (Fix for life method) cadaver tissues. The continued generation of reliable human tissue data will be valuable for research areas such as virtual twin models, life-like training and education phantoms, surgical instrument and implant development.
