Health-care practitioners' stories can aid medical device designers
Monday, July 11, 2011 - 16:30
in Health & Medicine
Health care laws to protect patients' privacy make it nearly impossible for medical device designers to develop and test the safety and usability of medical products by observing use in an actual practitioner-patient setting. As a result, usability errors and hazards may be overlooked, with the potential for devastating consequences. In the recent issue of Ergonomics in Design, human factors/ergonomics researchers found that storytelling as a qualitative research method was a more effectiveand stimulatingway for health care practitioners to provide valuable insights during the information-gathering and product development phases.