Individuals Utilization Behavior While Using Critical Healthcare Systems (Medical Ventilator)

Abstract

Ergonomics and human factors play an important role in interaction design. Poor usabil-ity design of critical safety systems can easily lead to human error. While inspecting the critical systems, there are vital factors that have to be considered, such as demographic, organizational, interface design, and task factors. This study has inspected the influence of different demographic factors (age, gender, and education) on the medical ventilator system's usability. The primary purpose is to seek the difference in task completion time, reflection time, and the number of touches during the interaction, considering different demographic factors. As well as to seek the difference in perceived task workload in-dex. To test the study hypothesis, the Hamilton-c6 ventilator prototype was developed. The experiments were conducted on 54 participants, including physicians and nurses, in a controlled environment from different public-private sector hospitals in Pakistan. De-scriptive statistics and ANOVA were used to assess the study objectives. The results suggest significant differences between male vs. female and physician's vs. nurses groups while interacting with safety-critical systems. However, the difference between young and older adults was not significant. These findings have substantial implications for the effective user-centric design of safety-critical systems.