When people think of human factors, what often comes to mind are egregious incidents of human error: the nuclear accidents at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island or the 2010 Deepwater Horizon drilling rig disaster. But human factors should, and does, address the everyday - from hitting the snooze button in the morning, to driving to work, to using a surgical tool in an operating room.
Use errors created by poor human factors are often merely annoyances that drive your user to create workarounds or that drive them to your competitor. In healthcare and personal safety, use errors can create such life-threatening risks that regulatory agencies have begun enforcing comprehensive consideration of human behaviors within their certification processes (such as the FDA’s adoption of IEC 62366:2007 Application of Usability Engineering to Medical Devices). At Daedalus, we consider both the body (ergonomics) and the mind (human information processing), and we create interfaces that are efficient to use and that reduce or eliminate the likelihood of errors. We use experience, research, and expertise to identify opportunities and generate innovative solutions. We have a broad library of anthropometric data to resolve many ergonomic issues. Other issues are addressed with research, testing, and recommendation. Our in-house facilities support the construction of specialized research environments with multi-camera digital video and audio for recording. This allows us to review activities from several angles and in slow motion to identify problems that may otherwise go unreported and to identify the roots of those problems. Our staff includes designers, human machine interface specialists, and a cognitive psychologist.