Establishing a Human Factors and Usability Center for Medical Devices in Brazil

Abstract

This paper describes the main goals, motivation and challenges in developing Human Factors and Usability Engineering expertise to be applied to medical devices at a University in Brazil. With the advancement of medical instrumentation, it was necessary to develop studies to evaluate the variables that could affect the ability of people to use medical equipment properly. Advantages of using technological innovations in health care settings have been widely touted. However, many technologies designed to support patient treatment and diagnosis have been abandoned due to problems in their use and design. This has resulted in patient and user safety risks, an increase in healthcare complexity and dissatisfaction by end users. In Brazil, there is a lack in specialized centers that could investigate these problems. Also, there is a lack of knowledge of human factors methods that could help understand the causes of use errors and inform the medical device design process. Creating a Usability and Human Factors Lab for Medical Devices (and team) may increase health care safety by supporting usability studies on equipment while also educating and training students; this would benefit Brazilian industries, health care institutions and government agencies.