Biomedical engineering and Biomechanical engineering, both are the engineering disciplines and deals in the same theme, life sciences. Although they are similar in the themes, there are lots of dissimilarities between them. Biomedical engineering is generally said as the application of engineering principles to the life sciences. Biomechanical engineering is the field which involves the study of the way in which a living thing moves.

Biomedical Engineering

Biomedical engineering is the more broadly encircling field which includes the improvement of engineering solutions that is applied to both biological and clinical fields. Biomedical field is a recently emerged independent engineering discipline compared to others. This field can be said as bridge between the engineering and medicine. It integrates the design concepts and problem solving skills in the engineering field with medicine and life sciences for the development of healthcare diagnosis, therapy and monitoring.

A great deal of work in biomedical engineering involves the research and development in diverse areas like tissue engineering, neural implants, kinetic modeling, medical imaging instrumentation and cell signaling. The outstanding biomedical applications include various diagnostic and therapeutic medical devices, biotechnologies such as regenerative tissue growth, development of biocompatible prostheses and pharmaceutical drugs and biopharmaceuticals.

Biomechanical Engineering

Biomechanical engineering, also called Bioengineering, is the engineering discipline that is usually recognized as a subset of Biomedical engineering. This is basically a research oriented field in which the activities are carried out using the principles in physical sciences in order to create a better understand in biological systems. The field is the application of various engineering principles to the living structures.

However it applies principles like mass, heat transfer, fluid mechanics, kinetics, catalysts, polymer science, etc. to design and create usable and physical products to either imitate or control the biological systems. Some of the recognized biomechanical engineering areas include kinetics, cell targeting, microfludics and physiological modeling. Due to this field’s strong dependence on the basic sciences, biomechanics, tissue engineering and drug delivery are considered as biomechanical engineering.

Key differentiators between Biomedical and Biomechanical Engineering

Biomedical engineering is the field which implements the engineering principles to the life sciences whereas Biomechanical or Bioengineering involves the application of engineering principles to the movements of living things.

Biomedical engineering is the field which seeks to fill the gap between engineering and medicine whereas the Biomechanical engineering applies its concepts and design to create various products that are useful for the biological systems.

Even though Biomedical engineering and Biomechanical engineering deals in the same field, they are at poles apart.