January 26th 2012
With a number of students designing medical devices this year for their major projects, the opportunity to attend LEG (London Ergonomics Group) and UKUPA (Usability Professionals’ Association) event at UCL’s Interaction Centre on the design and usability of medical devices last week was fantastic. The event was lead by four speakers that complimented each other as they were all from different backgrounds and specialised in different areas.
Patrick Jordan, who has already given us a guest lecture here at Brunel on other areas of his work, kicked off the event with a talk about designing with a human-centred approach for health and well-being products and systems. He discussed a range of issues in healthcare from a practical and psychological point of view including the design of the services, systems, products and messages that affect people’s health.
One of his key points was the misunderstanding of labels and bad instructions complicating procedures and administration of drugs in hospitals leading to unnecessary fatalities. In the US the preventable medical malpractice deaths is equivalent to two 727s crashing every day.
Patrick Jordan has been working closely with Brunel University’s Inclusive Design Research Group lately on a paper that has been accepted for publication at a conference on inclusiveness.
Next to speak was Polly Shelton, who spoke about some of the practical aspects of incorporating and embedding human factors into the medical product design cycle. She covered aspects such as, standards for usability testing, to the different types of research that should be conducted, to how best to recruit participants. To summarise she gave some examples of case studies, this talk in particular was really helpful for the stages we are currently at in our designs.
Matt Pattison, who described his journey (very apt timing with the release of MIB tagline last week – Journey’s Fuelled by ideas) talked about how his own experiences through life and the use of behavioural observation helped in designing meaningful and effective products and services.
Chris Vincent was the final speaker and covered some of the research done by UCL’s CHI-MED project. He explained collaborative working practices and shared examples of them and also went through all the stages required for designing and producing a safe medical useable device.
Overall it was a really interesting evening that we all gained a lot from and will definitely be putting the information and advice into practice over the coming months.
Laura Hodges, Level 3, Studying Product Design BSc
Tags: conference, inclusive, Made in Brunel, medical, usability
