Healthcare is undergoing a remarkable shift as treatments that were previously envisioned as taking place only in hospitals and clinics are now moving into the home. However, this paradigm shift represents a daunting challenge for medical equipment designers and manufacturers. Transitioning treatments into the home cannot be accomplished just by creating a simplified user manual and adding patient training — not when mistakes could have deadly consequences. Rather, this transition requires that we recognize, understand, and mitigate a vast number of fundamental differences between home and clinical healthcare use environments.
This IDSA session, hosted by Daedalus’ Human Factors and Research Manager, illustrated the myriad of differences that must be considered and mitigated when equipment is transitioned from use by trained medical professionals in the clinic to home use by patients and familial caregivers: differences in education, expertise, training, affective responses, physical environments, and how users’ physical, cognitive and perceptual capabilities change with age. The workshop then guided participants through a clinic-to-home product transition with an illustrative case study, including breakout ideation sessions to redesign the case study equipment for use in the home. Images