Embedding Ethics into Neuroengineering Education: A Human-Centered Engineering Course on Neurorehabilitation

Neurotechnologies such as brain-computer interfaces, neuroprosthetics, neural-controlled exoskeletons, and brain stimulation systems are redefining how neurological patients are diagnosed and treated and how humans and machines interact. Thus, they raise crucial ethical questions about how they can and should impact our lives during their integration into society. To have a positive impact on society, a new generation of neuroengineers need to be trained to be aware of these ethical concerns and address them in their research and development projects. In this paper, we present a university course on neurorehabilitation technologies designed and tested for integrating ethics and social sciences into neuroengineering education. Following a competences-centered didactic approach, we discuss how project-based learning can be applied to help the students acquire a diverse set of human-centered engineering competences. Our results show that students trained in this way learn to embed multiple ethical values into their neurore-habilitation technologies and successfully design and describe evaluation experiments in accordance with the guidelines of a research ethics commission.