Abstract
The issue begins with an award-winning paper by Wiggermann and colleagues, whose design effort won the 2017 Stanley Caplan User-Centered Design Award. The award recognizes excellence in product design as well as the use of human factors/ergonomics methods that can be incorporated throughout the design continuum. To me, ergonomics in design is about “keeping it simple and safe” for the user. The authors’ work on an innovative medical-surgical bed clearly demonstrates how human factors/ergonomics in design is key to promoting safety and ease of use by patients and caregivers. At Providence Regional Medical Center (located in Everett, Washington), I teach safe patient handling and mobility to caregivers. One aspect of this instruction is educating caregivers on the importance of bed mobility and hospital bed design features. The “smart” bed discussed in this paper has great potential for improving safety and patient care.
The issue also includes work from Roberts and colleagues, who developed a prototype for monitoring task simulating drilling scenarios with drilling experts and then piloted it on a subset of offshore drillers to examine their cognitive skills. The paper highlights the importance of situational awareness and safety for improving human performance, especially in high-reliability organizations. Since the future of the oil and gas industry seems to be in “smart” drilling, their work evaluating high-level cognitive skills in high-risk offshore drilling is very promising. Although their situation awareness simulating task still needs to be validated, I can envision their simulated task as an easy and portable application to evaluate adverse scenarios in high-reliability organizations such as health care, aviation, and nuclear power.
Also on the topic of high-reliability organizations is Chaparro and colleagues’ review on a very important but simple safety tool—the checklist. In this praiseworthy paper, the authors emphasize barriers to checklist use in health care settings. They also discuss how human factors professionals can promote the use of checklists in the health care industry as a way to help prevent human error. That said, as a high-reliability instructor at Providence Regional Medical Center, I must acknowledge that one should also be mindful of other fundamental sources of human error (e.g., rule and knowledge-based). This type of mindfulness when combined with the use of checklists can go a long way in preventing adverse events by a caregiver.
Finally, I’d like to mention the noteworthy design innovation work of undergraduate biomedical engineering student teams from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Nimunkar and colleagues reported how their students utilized their ergonomics and design education and training to develop groundbreaking six ergonomics solutions for commercial laboratory technicians. This unique paper showcases the complete design process from inception (including the development of designs for each ergonomics problem), building and testing prototypes, and putting the final products into practice in the real word—a perfect example of (research) design to practice. Kudos to the students and their mentors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for developing such an innovative curriculum. As EID’s editor-in-chief, I believe it is important to invite and encourage students to submit their capstone design projects, and I sincerely hope that we receive more high-quality university student design submissions in the year to come.
Last but not least, I would like to acknowledge the excellent contributions of past, continuing, and new senior editors, associate editors, and ad hoc reviewers.* I know that my work has just started, and I intend to work hard to increase the visibility, quality, and readership of EID beyond HFES membership. In the meantime, you, the readers and potential authors, can help in this endeavor through your continued resolve to contribute manuscripts and design work. Together, we will make EID the premiere platform for design-minded human factors and ergonomics professionals throughout the world.
Footnotes
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Please note the revised new 2019 members at the senior and associate level positions.