Thirteenth International Conference on Design Principles & Practices

Abstract

This research is conducted within a Ph.D. program in Product Design and is focused on the healthcare sector. In particular, it investigates the problems around the interaction with medical devices in a hospital context. Specifically, the objective is to develop a tool for designing a correct physical and cognitive interaction with medical devices taking into consideration both doctors and nurses as well as patients as final users and the surrounding context. In order to bridge both the design problems and issues of the healthcare sector, the tools and methods of cognitive ergonomics have been chosen as the discipline studies mental processes that are affecting interactions among humans and other elements of a system. The literature review has led to a thesis that states that a set of certain ‘cognitive ergonomics features’ may represent all the aspects useful to design an efficient and psychologically comfortable interaction with medical devices. Therefore, the paper discusses and demonstrates the dynamics that unite the ‘features’ and analyzes how they are represented in medical devices through a scheme of the interrelations of the ‘features’ and through the analysis of best practices. The result of this analysis is to estimate the validity of the ‘features’ to then develop a design tool to be applied in real contexts (hospital).