Thanks for Stopping by: A Review of HFES 2018

by Christina S

The first week of October, the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) International Annual Meeting came to our hometown of Philadelphia! This conference included presentations and events from a variety of human factors domains, such as surface transportation, aviation, and, of course, healthcare. Since the meeting took place in our own backyard, we made sure to get involved in several ways throughout the week.

Our Events
Our booth in the Expo Hall advertised the breadth of work we do here at DS and gave us a chance to connect with familiar and new faces.

The DS-sponsored Happy Hour on Tuesday for the joint Product Design and Healthcare Technical Groups was a big success, with HFES members packing The Fieldhouse restaurant.

We then hosted a technical tour the following evening, where we got to show HFES and PDMA members around our new office. Guests saw how we set up various use environments in our testing rooms and got a sense of how we manage videography in complex environments, such as the operating room. We also had demos of our eye tracking and force sensing technologies. We even had fun activities for our visitors: guests had the chance to try out their recruiting skills by recruiting for a mock study and flexed their design muscles by creating illustrations and step language to guide users through assembling a toy.

Our Knowledge Sharing
Our CEO, Katie Hansbro, chaired two sessions: Health Care and Medical Devices and Human Factors Methods and Tools in Health Care.

Katie Tippey, a DS Human Factors Engineer, was involved in professional development events for students on Monday and gave presentations on two topics later in the week. The first was her postdoctoral work with Vanderbilt University Medical Center on patient-reported non-routine events in oncology treatment; the second was an internal project at DS exploring different styles of moderating in usability studies.

In the latter presentation, Katie overviewed how usability studies in the medical domain are conducted before detailing three distinct moderating styles that emerged from a series of interviews with professional moderators. The Venn diagram highlights the results from the presentation.

Katie is also now the Product Development Technical Group Program Chair-Elect for the annual meeting next year!

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