Personalised Health Technology | Specialisation overview

Use your in-depth knowledge of mechanical engineering principles to tackle healthcare challenges and improve the treatment of patients.

Mechanical engineering is an important discipline in the healthcare sector when it comes to medical device design. Exoskeletons, special wheelchairs, surgical instruments, and even entire artificial hearts or lungs are all medical devices that could not be developed without the application of mechanical principles. So, how can you apply fluid mechanics to the blood flow in artificial heart valves? What does it take to translate the mechanics of human movement into the design of an exoskeleton? And how can precision mechanisms form the basis of surgical tool design? If you want to build expertise in the domain of healthcare technology as a mechanical engineer, the specialisation in Personalised Health Technology is right for you.

What is Personalised Health Technology?

If you think about it, the human body can be considered a complex system of interconnected components that work with underlying mechanical principles. For example, the heart can be considered a fluid pump, and muscles can be considered actuators. So, you need to use your understanding of mechanical engineering to model the complex human body behavior, since it is highly non-linear, time-dependent, and non-isotropic. This understanding is gained by the courses in fundamentals such as heat and mass transfer, fluid dynamics, and control within this specialisation. You will use this knowledge to analyse, simulate, and support aspects of human functioning, from studying the mechanical properties of living biological tissue to flow problems related to the heart and lungs to the dynamics and coordination of the human movement system. Subsequently, you will learn how to design by integrating knowledge about product design, materials, and production technology to generate solutions for important healthcare challenges and the medical device industry.

Examples of core courses you might follow during this specialisation:

The course Integrative Design of Biomedical Products will give you the full design approach needed for medical device development, covering clinical context, user needs, tissue properties, and alike. All these aspects need to be considered to develop a completely new medical device that solves an actual patient's needs.
The course Medical Certification and Human Factors teach you how to apply the law on Medical Device Regulation with hands-on work on prototypes. Compliance with this law is mandatory for any medical device to be sold on the European market and requires a risk assessment of the product.
The course Project Engineering Management will offer you the skills to work together with many other disciplines in order to be able to properly execute not only the medical device design, but also make sure that it will be a product that can actually be sold on the market.
What does it take to design and develop a medical device for the support or replacement of internal organs like hearts, lungs, or kidneys? How can you understand the interaction between blood and the medical device, and how can you analyse the risks involved? That is what the course Development of Artificial Internal Organs is all about.

One of the great benefits of this specialisation is the opportunity to expand your knowledge in other vital disciplines as well, since you will work together in interdisciplinary teams with biomedical and electrical engineers, physicists, and technical physicians, with access to UT’s innovative TechMed Centre. You might design an ambulation device for artificial lung patients to increase the outcome of a future lung transplant or analyse the mechanical failure mechanisms in hip implants. Or what about modelling and predicting how muscle forces operate when humans walk, or improving the production of critical components of burned tissue suction pumps?

What will you learn?

As a graduate of this Master's and this specialisation, you have acquired specific, scientific knowledge, skills and values, which you can put to good use in your future job.

After completing this Master’s specialisation, you have:
- robust knowledge of the development of safe and effective medical devices for patients while complying with regulatory requirements.
- a broad overview of the application areas of medical technology and typical manufacturing processes applied in medical technology.
- in-depth understanding of mechanical engineering fundamentals and know how to apply them to model human (tissue) behavior for the development of medical devices.
After successfully finishing this Master’s specialisation, you:
- can apply the newest mechanical engineering technologies to the medical field.
- can develop new diagnostic and therapeutic healthcare solutions in collaboration with stakeholders.
- can work in highly interdisciplinary teams, understanding each other's specific professional language.
After completing this Master’s specialisation, you:
- value patient-centered approaches in development processes and integrate this in your work approach.
- consider the various perspectives of stakeholders involved in medical product development and its industrial, technological, and societal context.
- can ethically use technology about human well-being.

Other master's and specialisations

If you are wondering about the differences between ME-PHT and BME-MDD, please take a look at this explanatory video.

Is this specialisation not exactly what you’re looking for? Maybe one of the other specialisations suits you better. Or find out more about these other master's:

Master’s in Biomedical Engineering (specialisation in Medical Device Design)
Master’s in Industrial Design Engineering (specialisation in Emerging Technology Design or Management of Product Development)