When you sit down in front of the television, do you ever change the channel when you want to turn up the volume instead? Or have trouble finding the mute button on someone else’s TV remote? If so, these are examples of “user errors” found in everyday tasks, noted Assoc. Engineering Prof. Stephanie Guerlain, who has been conducting research in the field of cognitive engineering.
Guerlain, who presented a lecture last month at the 2008 Frontiers of Engineering Symposium, hosted by the National Academy of Engineering , said user error is relatively common and can stem from a lack of practical design and a lack of incorporation of important cognitive psychological factors. While user error varies across different products and systems, it can have devastating effects for “high-risk industries,” such as medical care, Guerlain said.
In the case of industries where computer-generated systems are used, problems can easily arise simply by pushing a button or clicking on the wrong command.
“You could make the mistake and not realize it,” she said.
Guerlain’s research focuses on observing how people interact with different products and on improving that interaction by developing more easily accessible interfaces.
“Some products are designed in such a way that they have user hazards, which means that the way that the system is designed leads to error,” Guerlain said.
She added that this is particularly relevant in the medical field, where patient safety is the highest concern.
“There are so many opportunities for us to improve our systems of care and our interfaces for care between us doctors and nurses,” said Margaret Plews-Ogan, clinical internal medicine associate professor and chief of the University’s Division of General Medicine. “Up to this point, doctors have been working harder to try and make health care safer, but we’re very interested in working with engineers,” she said. “If we want to do this well, we have to work as a team.”
There are many opportunities for better design for systems in the medical field; even simple things like an IV label can make a large difference, Plews-Ogan said. If the label is poorly designed, a nurse could hang the wrong bag by mistake, which might harm a patient, Plews-Ogan said, adding that clear and systematic label design could assist nursing staff to prevent such situations from occurring in the first place.
With problems like this in mind, the Medical School and University Medical Center collaborated to form the Institute for Patient Quality and Safety, which was “designed with the vision to bring together these different disciplines to improve our care for patients,” said Plews-Ogan, who is also the director of the institute. It was formed in January of the this year and incorporates faculty from the Medical School, Nursing School, Engineering School and potentially “everyone who has a stake in improving patient care.”
This program is unique and part of an emerging field, Plews-Ogan said.
“At the University, we’re farther along with this than many other institutions,” she noted.
To understand the cognitive engineering behind existing systems better, University researchers use a system of task analysis to observe initial usage, then design prototypes to create a better model, Guerlain said.
“We really think about the design and the users’ perspectives. Knowing how and why a system or product is supposed to carry out a task is crucial to its design from an engineering standpoint,” she said. “If you don’t understand how it’s supposed to work, it’s hard to have a workable design.”
According to Guerlain’s research, one of the problems with most products today is that their systems do not “fit” with people’s pre-existing knowledge and their expectations for how products organize that knowledge. There are some cognitive activities that are fairly standard across human capabilities, and it is therefore beneficial for systems to incorporate these trends, Guerlain said.
Memory capacity is also an important factor, she said, because “so many designs don’t take into account the limitations on short-term memory.” There are restrictions on short-term memory, she said, and when presented with too much information, people become quickly overwhelmed.
“In short-term memory you can hold only a limited numbers of things – about seven things,” Psychology Chair Dennis Proffitt said. The things a person can retain are also dependent upon the type and size of the items stored, he said, noting that “unless you rehearse or reinstate the memory, it will be lost in 20 minutes.”
There is often significant overlap between human and technical factors, Guerlain said. Finding an interface that is both practical and incorporates psychological principles requires a cross-disciplinary approach, she said.
“The people that do it best are the people who bring in cognitive psychologists at the very start,” Proffitt said, noting that principles of cognitive psychology need to be introduced at the start of a project design, rather than waiting until something goes wrong.
Overall, Guerlain said, cognitive engineering is a relatively new field and there is still much to learn.
“It’s very broad-spectrum,” she said.
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