With a lot of focus on human factors in healthcare, and an increasing number companies developing devices destined for use outside the hospital, there’s particular interest in the challenges surrounding home healthcare.
With a lot of focus on human factors in healthcare, and an increasing number companies developing devices destined for use outside the hospital, there’s particular interest in the challenges surrounding home healthcare.
The implementation of human factors engineering throughout the design process will be critical for emerging mobile health applications, not only because FDA is regulating these new mobile medical devices, but because it’s good practice and is an essential tool for decreasing patient safety risks while increasing usability and effectiveness.
Much of the information gathered during evaluation in the early stages of product development is necessarily qualitative. Some quantifiable questions remain: how much deviation is there in the angle at which different doctors hold a laprascopic device? How does the movement of someone wearing a brace compare to that of a healthy person? Questions such as these can be answered using computer vision.
Whether you are designing an autonomous surgical robot, a patient-specific knee implant, or a paperweight for all the new regulations, volumes of data are useless without the proper specification framework to filter and process it.
Most databases today aren’t adaptable; it’s hard and the benefits aren’t significant enough to make the effort worthwhile. Most companies with products of various sizes have relatively few variations (think S, M, L, XL); and in this case, adaptability is superfluous.
True sustainability isn’t about compromise; it is about creating innovative solutions that are not only good for the world, but good for business.
Medical device manufacturers are increasingly aware of the need to conduct in-depth user research in the field as part of the product requirements process. Little information exists on what to expect when conducting user research in the OR. Although every hospital is different, here is some practical advice from our recent experience.
