Systems Engineering

According to the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE), "Systems Engineering" is defined as an interdisciplinary approach and means to enable the realization of successful systems.  It focuses on defining customer needs and required functionality early in the development cycle, documenting requirements, then proceeding with design synthesis and system validation while considering the complete problem: operations, performance, test, manufacturing, cost & schedule, training and support, and disposal.

BioEchoes has over twenty years of experience in systems engineering, which include:

MISHAP ANALYSIS (SERIOUS Incident Investigation)
Since 1990, the company’s biomedical engineers have analyzed the role of system safety and ethical leadership in injury prevention within hundreds of environments involving serious injury, most often within the context of personal injury civil and criminal litigation.

We have assisted corporations and legal professionals in their investigation of system safety failures to answer questions such as

• What was the root cause of the mishap?
• Did the injury incident occur in the manner in which it was reported?
• What role, if any, did individual error play in the cause of the injury?
• Under different conditions, would injury still occur?
• Did the injury result from engineering system failure and/or inadequate/unethical leadership?

Public Outreach, Classroom and Field Training
BioEchoes has 25 years experience in providing classroom and field training in injury prevention at home, at work, at play, and while traveling. Programs have been provided to organizations and agencies such as

• Alabama State Legislature
• Florida Association for Pupil Transportation
• Global Road Safety Forum
• Gonzalo Rodriguez Memorial Foundation (Montevideo, Uruguay)
• NHTSA Southeast Region 4
• NIOSH

Biohorizons implant systems, inc.
Dr. Martha Bidez founded and incubated Alabama's first biomedical implant company, BioHorizons Implant Systems, Inc., within BioEchoes (formerly Bidez and Associates, Inc.). The new company entered a global, highly consolidated dental implant marketplace with breakthrough, proprietary technology developed in Dr. Bidez' university-based laboratory and exclusively licensed to Bidez and Associates. BioHorizons was spun out as a separate, investor financed entity in 1996. Ten years later, in 2006, the company was sold to a research-based private equity firm in New York, Healthpoint Capital. Dr. Bidez was CEO for the company's first five years and remained Chair of the Board of Directors from the company's inception to its ultimate sale. Annual revenue now exceeds $170,000,000 with 7 wholly-owned subsidiaries in Australia, Canada, Chile, Germany, Mexico, Spain, and the United Kingdom.

The BioHorizons' story demonstrates the systems engineering expertise of BioEchoes to assemble and lead an interdisciplinary team and multi-million dollar project through concept development, system safety design and integration, testing and evaluation, manufacturing, policy and regulatory development and review (FDA, ISO, etc.), technical training, and implementation (commercialization).

EDU-CAR
From 2006 to the present, BioEchoes' biomedical engineers served as the lead engineering team in the technical development and implementation of a unique child passenger safety project in South America, which was funded by the World Bank Global Road Safety Facility and the FIA Foundation. BioEchoes' conducted a "gap analysis" within the country of Uruguay to assess the readiness of the vehicle fleet and child safety seat products to support a "buckle-up" public awareness campaign. BioEchoes discovered the vast majority of vehicles on Uruguayan roads had inadequate or no seat belts in the back seat to restrain a child safety seat. A consumer safety regulatory system was present for neither vehicles nor child safety seats; the quality was unacceptably poor.

The EDU-CAR story demonstrates the systems engineering expertise of BioEchoes to investigate the state of child passenger safety in an existing system (community), identify the technical deficiencies in moving forward with a scheduled "buckle-up" campaign, meet with high ranking government officials to frame needed public policy for product safety, design and experimentally test retro-fit solutions for the existing vehicle fleet rear seat restraint systems.

To learn more, please contact us.