Medical Instrumentation: Accessibility and Usability Considerations

Two of the most important yet often overlooked aspects of a medical device are its usability and accessibility. This is important not only for health care providers, but also for older patients and users with disabilities or activity limitations. Medical Instrumentation: Accessibility and Usability Considerations focuses on how lack of usability and accessibility pose problems for designers and users of medical devices, and how to overcome these limitations.

Divided into five broad sections, the book first addresses the nature and extent of the problem by identifying access barriers, human factors, and policy issues focused on the existing infrastructure. The subsequent sections examine responses to the problem, beginning with tools for usability and accessibility analysis and principles of design for medical instrumentation. Building on this foundation, the third section focuses on recommendations for design guidelines while the fourth section explores emerging trends and future technologies for improving medical device usability. The final section outlines key challenges, knowledge gaps, and recommendations from accomplished experts in the field presented at the recent Workshop on Accessible Interfaces for Medical Instrumentation.

Integrating expert perspectives from a wide array of disciplines, Medical Instrumentation traces a clear roadmap for improving accessibility and usability for a variety of stakeholders and provides the tools necessary to follow it.

Jack M. Winters, Ph.D., is professor of biomedical engineering and John P. Raynor Distinguished Chair at Marquette University and director of the RERC on Accessible Medical Instrumentation. Since receiving a Ph.D. in bioengineering from the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco, he has been a biomedical engineering faculty member for 20 years, twice serving as department chair. His areas of research include movement biomechanics, neurorehabilitation, telerehabilitation, and accessible medical instrumentation. Molly Follette Story, M.S., is president of Human Spectrum Design, L.L.C. and codirector of the RERC on Accessible Medical Instrumentation. From 1994 to 2004, she was coordinator of research at the Center for Universal Design at North Carolina State University and twice served as its interim executive director. She is also a Ph.D. student in ergonomics at University of California–Berkeley.