Improving biomedical education in Latin America through open science hardware: A case study of one medical school in Mexico

In 2024, we launched the Advancing Biomedical Research & Education in Latin American (abreLA) program to train university students and professors to use open hardware and open software technologies in the classroom. Advantages of these technologies include their low cost, often portability, and thus increased opportunities for hands-on learning, even in limited-resource environments. Here we specifi cally focus on our work with the Department of Physiology, School of Medicine at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). We describe a two-stage approach in which we fi rst ran workshops to generate interest in the program and recruit professors, and then ran practical exercises for those professors’ groups, which consisted of electrocardiogram and electromyogram recordings using open hardware devices and open data acquisition software. In total, we worked with 7 professors and over 300 students, receiving both quantitative and qualitative feedback in the form of surveys and interviews. The results are encouraging, demonstrating the viability of this training model, and generating ideas for future work.