1.1 – Introduction

Welcome to the wonderful world of Biomedical Instrument Troubleshooting. Think back to several years ago when you were applying for college.  Why did you choose the Biomedical Engineering Technology program? My guess is you wanted to be involved in a cutting edge industry while working with your hands and solving complex problems. If this sounds like you, then your in luck. BTEC 315: Biomedical Instrument Troubleshooting combines your knowledge from your biomedical and electrical engineering courses and applies that to troubleshooting biomedical equipment. In this course, you will gain the knowledge needed to troubleshoot and fix biomedical equipment and have the opportunity to work hands-on with this equipment problem solving and repairing different malfunctions.

What does a Biomedical Engineering Technologist (BMET) do? Biomedical engineering technologists provide support and service of biomedical equipment that includes inspection, installation, preventative maintenance and repair of biomedical equipment. This work can be conducted in a variety of health care settings and include any equipment that physicians, nurses and other medical personnel use to monitor, diagnose and treat medical conditions. In order to accomplish this, BMETs have certain duties:

• Inspect, maintain, repair, test, and installation of biomedical equipment
• Design and modification of biomedical equipment
• Training the end user, i.e. nurses, technicians etc
• Procurement procedures

Troubleshooting is a systematic process of problem solving that is applied to failed parts of a system or the system as a whole. The systematic process refers to a specific sequence of testing that allows you to determine what part or system has failed. Failure of parts or a system refers to the malfunction of that part, system or equipment preventing it from operating as expected. The system is any combination of parts, components or modules that perform a specific task. In this course, the systems we will be working on are biomedical equipment. We will give you the tools needed to systematically identify failed components or systems on biomedical equipment and the expertise to repair malfunctioning equipment.

Failures can occur at many different levels and you will be responsible for identifying and troubleshooting at various levels. Troubleshooting levels can include identifying malfunctions at the system level, equipment/unit level, board/module level or component level.

In week one, we are going to start at the very beginning an learn about common equipment found in a hospital and we will use a black-box model to gain a general understanding of how equipment works. In addition, we will review the different classification systems used on medical devices in Canada. This is likely going to be a review for most of you but reiterating material so that you are confident with these concepts is never a bad idea.