December 22, 2025

#711 – Medical Electronics Education with Mark Palmeri

1 hour 29 minutes

Welcome Dr Mark Palmeri, professor at Duke University!

Mark has been at Duke since 1996, and has completed undergraduate, graduate, medical, and PhD degrees here (!)

He has focused on making medical devices and now teaches others to do the same in his Biomedical Engineering (BME) courses

Verification and Validation (v&v) is a large constraint in getting a regulated medical device to market

BME design fellows is a program that guides students towards real world use cases and design projects

The courses that Mark runs reminds Chris of “automatic job offers” that Chris has heard about for classes like those taught by former guest Larry Sears (at CWRU). Also SMPS design courses at UT Dallas and microarchitecture courses like those taught at University of Michigan.

Teaching the skills of troubleshooting / debug

Putting together circuits like Legos

There are difficulties when teaching students with various levels of experience, namely how deep to go on any particular subject and how much background to provide.

Mark has been flipping a circuit course on its head, instead prompting students with ideas like “how do you capture bio signals electronically and pull them into a microcontroller”

Tools of the trade for Mark’s courses include

KiCad

ngspice (built in to KiCad)

Jupyter notebooks

VS code

Git

Zephyr

Talking about power as an intuition builder, as opposed to currents or voltages

V&V requires that you have a quality management system (QMS)

IEC60601

Going through companies that have QMS can be a shorter path for bringing a device to market

Even face shields needed to go through that process when COVID hit

Firmware and embedded in BME at graduate level

Mark and students in BME Design Fellows course have been working on a Tympanometer, targeted at resource constrained industries

Mark also teaches students how to use Zephyr, as opposed to how most educational programs migrate towards arduino

A challenge for teaching Zephyr is the devicetreed

They target Nordic Semiconductor parts, which have great support and educational resources

Mark experienced a “vertical learning curve” when first migrating designs to Zephyr a few years ago

Complicating things is that most students haven’t coded in C, if they have done much code at all

Teaching how to lock to a particular version with Zephyr manifests

Using CI/CD for automated builds

Focusing on state machines early on, using Zephyr’s state machine framework (SMF)

All of Mark’s courses are on github under his username mlp6

Teaching stack vs heap

Mark only ever has taken one official progrmming course

The benefits of experiential learning

Accreditation is a constant challenge with non-standard courses and testing

Duke is taking retrospective and prospective looks at the space of education

Problem sets are moot these days

Mark gave a great example about teaching a student about Bode Plots

“Thats a trick problem” is something Mark hears wrt testing (when it’s definitely not)

“Getting the reps in” is an important concept in educational contexts, and something Chris really resonates with

Building open ended problems vs closed

The more open ended a problem, the more time it take to grade / evaluate

TI-85 / 83 / 92 calculators

Jupyter notebooks as a way to track progress and have students show their work

More about the tympanometer project

They have been working with Duke hospital, a major benefit for Mark and his BME colleagues

Continuous middle ear infection that causes scarring that causes lifelong loss

Sound reflection under vacuum is an indicator that more testing is needed

The key innovation is making it lower cost and allow a layperson to do the screening to hand off a child to get more screening at a pro clinic

BME Design Fellow students getting to design the various parts of the design

They have multiple sources of funding: private, nih, etc

Value engineering in medical space

Mark points out the philosophical question on whether you can reduce costs by reducing testing … but thinking about whyat that takes to satisfy that need

Find Mark online

mlp6 on Github

His Duke homepage

tymp project article

Find him on LinkedIn

Duke BME design fellows / on LinkedIn

...more

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By The Amp Hour (Chris Gammell and David L Jones)

4.9

226226 ratings