Human Factors Seminar Series

Human Factors MD offers a seminar series tailored to the needs of your product development teams. This series of 90 minute presentations is designed to educate your teams on the important role human factors can play in creating safe, highly-usable, and innovative products. Scheduled over several months, the series will help keep human factors "front of mind" and support your efforts to promote a more user-centered focus within your organization.

Not every medical device manufacturer confronts the same issues. We'll work with you to develop a series of seminars, each focused on a topic directly relevant to your organization's current or future needs. Possible seminar topics include:

What Everyone Should Know About Human Factors

Creating simpler, safer, more user-friendly products is a key objective for medical device manufacturers wishing to be competitive in today's medical device markets. Human factors can help. This seminar provides an introduction to human factors and its application to product design. Utilizing examples of good and bad design in every day life, from consumer products to medical devices, we'll lead participants on a discovery of what makes well-designed products user-friendly. We will go on to describe how human factors - the science of making technology better fit the people who use it - can be applied by companies to create more usable medical devices. The seminar ends with a discussion of the costs and benefits of embracing human factors, and how to evaluate the "usability ROI".

Meeting Human Factors Regulatory Requirements

Medical device manufacturers are now required by FDA and other international regulatory bodies to demonstrate how human factors considerations were met during their product's development. This seminar will help manufacturers understand their regulatory obligations with respect to human factors. We'll review the rationale behind these regulatory requirements, provide an overview of the FDA's human factors initiatives and expectations, outline the similarities and differences between international jurisdictions, and review relevant Human Factors Standards. We'll provide guidance on the difficult issue of how to determine the right level of investment in human factors given a device's inherent risk, and discuss how to strengthen regulatory submissions by highlighting human factors activities and findings.

Understanding Use-Related Errors

According to the oft-cited Institute of Medicine report, To Err is Human, medical errors cause as many as 98,000 deaths each year in the United States alone, more than traffic accidents, breast cancer or AIDS. Medical error is a undeniable problem. But the reality of medical errors is that they are seldom due to carelessness or negligence. More commonly, errors are caused by faulty systems: by basic flaws in the way healthcare technology and systems are designed and organized. In this seminar, we'll discuss the psychology of error, and provide a framework for understanding why people make errors when using medical devices - why they misread displays, ignore important warnings, and push the wrong buttons. We'll move on to demonstrate how the application of human factors can lead to better designs that substantially reduce the likelihood of errors or minimize their effects should they arise.

Designing Medical Devices for Older Users

Changes in population demographics coupled with the push toward home-based delivery of healthcare is resulting in an increasingly older population of patients and family caregivers. This poses special challenges to medical device manufacturers creating products for the home market. Creating safe and effective products for older users means designing to accommodate the cognitive, perceptual, and physical changes that accompany aging. This seminar provide of overview of age-related changes in our mental and physical capabilities. We'll review how our ability to see, hear, learn, remember, and interact with our physical environment change as we grow older, and what product designers can do to better accommodate older users.

To create your Human Factors Seminar Series, contact us.

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