Daedalus' Manager of Human Factors and User Research, Carolynn R. Johnson, recently guest lectured for the University of Pittsburgh's Human Factors in Engineering of Medical Devices, to provide students with an overview of the Cognitive side of human factors: human information processing; the limits of our attentional resources and memory capabilities, and how aging affects each; how cognitive biases, like anchoring and framing, impact our decision-making capabilities; and why the 10% Brain Use Myth persists despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
The Human Factors Engineering in Medical Device course (BIOENG 2175) focuses on the application of HFE in design, development and evaluation of medical devices. The educational goals of the course are: a) to learn the fundamentals of HFE relevant to medical devices, and b) to understand the HFE process in medical device design and evaluation according to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The image above is the Stroop Effect, a well-known phenomenon, in which reading (an automatic task for most adults) interferes with the task of stating the color that a word is printed in.