Are “Human Factors Engineers” Prepared for the Medical Device Industry? – Preliminary Findings from an Interactive Poster Survey

Abstract

As the medical device industry establishes more rigorous human factors practices in their design and development process, this is accompanied by an increase in demand in human factors professionals. The human factors activities have been performed by both professionals with formal human factors education and training and those who come from other backgrounds, such as engineering, natural science, medical fields, design and more. Both across those disciplines and the within human factors field, there is no standard curriculum or requirements for educating and preparing human factors engineers/professionals for the medical device/health care domain. To better understand how (well) human factors professionals are prepared for the medical device industry, a survey was administered in the form of an interactive poster at the 2019 International Symposium in Human Factors and Ergonomics in Health Care. Data were collected regarding where symposium attendees, most of whom are human factors professionals in health care/medical device, learned the important knowledge/skills required for human factors practice in the medical device industry. In this paper, the method is described in details, and results from the poster survey are presented and discussed.