China
Africa
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Understanding the Patient, Wellness, and Caregiving Work of Older Adults
Published in Rupa S. Valdez, Richard J. Holden, The Patient Factor, 2021
Abigail R. Wooldridge, Wendy A. Rogers
All of the earlier highlighted activities have ergonomic aspects—perceptual, cognitive, physical, and organizational (see Volume I of this handbook). Cognitive ergonomics considers the cognitive abilities of humans including mental processes such as perception, memory, reasoning, and motor response. Physical ergonomics focuses on human anatomy, physiology, anthropometry, and biomechanics. Organizational ergonomics focuses on the optimization of sociotechnical systems, including the interactions between the people, tasks, tools, and environment. Our goal in this chapter is to provide an organizing framework to characterize the needs of older adults, emphasizing that multiple components and interactions between these components must be considered in the context of human factors/ergonomics (HFE) practice. We provide a general overview of older adult needs, illustrating the diversity of older adults. We then discuss the three types of work—patient, wellness, and caregiving—to provide a conceptual grounding for our framework, which we will detail in the context of older adults in the home and in formal care settings to demonstrate the range of challenges. Approaches to developing solutions include user-centered design and participatory design, which we illustrate with examples. We conclude with recommendations for future research and development efforts that can support patient, wellness, and caregiving work of older adults.
Consumer Health Information Technology
Published in Richard J. Holden, Rupa S. Valdez, The Patient Factor, 2021
Teresa Zayas-Cabán, P. Jon White
Particular cognitive ergonomics issues that need to be addressed after the application is implemented include whether the consumer health IT solution is being used as intended, what kinds of difficulties users are encountering, in what unintended ways it is being utilized, whether characteristics of users and non-users differ, and whether actual use suggests future development needs. For example, several studies have found differences between portal users and non-users. Patient portal users are typically white, younger, female, and have higher income, education, and health literacy (Anthony et al., 2018; L. V. Grossman et al., 2019). Concerns regarding privacy and security can also impact portal use, as well as perceived portal benefits (Dendere et al., 2019). Studies also continue to find that some interfaces are not well-designed, inhibiting patients’ or caregivers’ abilities to effectively use them (Dendere et al., 2019). Regarding physical ergonomics, it is also important to determine if there are barriers to use for different populations, if any accessibility issues are not being met, whether the consumer health IT application can be effectively used across patients’ differing physical infrastructures, whether the infrastructure has unintended effects on use and outcome, and how the solution will adapt to changing infrastructure requirements. Organizational ergonomics aspects include paying attention to how the application’s use aligns with structures, policies, and processes; whether access rights need to be reassessed; and whether they fit with the patient’s or caregiver’s broader work system. Since these portals are offered by care provider organizations, the relationship with clinicians has been shown to influence use. If clinicians do not encourage patients to use the portal or they do not want to use the portal themselves, this will impact patient and caregiver use (Dendere et al., 2019). In particular, research has shown that clinicians may not offer all their patients access to their organization’s patient portal (Anthony et al., 2018). There may also be disparities in different provider organization’s abilities to engage patients or caregivers through their portals (Dendere et al., 2019).
Research outputs in ergonomics and human factors engineering: a bibliometric and co-word analysis of content and contributions
Published in International Journal of Occupational Safety and Ergonomics, 2022
Akram Sadat Jafari Roodbandi, Alireza Choobineh, Niloofar Barahmand, Masoumeh Sadeghi
The very frequent keywords, presented in Table 4 and Figure 2, indicate the increasing popularity and attention of EHFE researchers to issues related to performance, biomechanics and human–computer interaction. The keywords related to this issue have larger nodes in the network structure of 60 highly frequent keywords shown in Figure 2. Highly frequent keywords are related to physical ergonomics (including the biomechanics ergonomics and work-related MSDs & work system design clusters) and performance/cognitive ergonomics (including the human machine interaction, performance, driving ergonomics and cognitive ergonomics clusters). This is a sign of better growth in areas of physical ergonomics and cognitive ergonomics as compared with management issues such as macro-ergonomics.
Development and testing of culturally adapted road hazard communication designs
Published in International Journal of Occupational Safety and Ergonomics, 2021
As already suggested, the symbols being used on the road need to be made more culturally appropriate for easy comprehension. This is because producing and using more culturally adapted symbols can minimize the cognitive effort required for comprehending the symbols and acting in accordance thereof. Indeed, cognitive ergonomics is supposed to be applied in a way that takes into account cognitive processes such as perception, information processing, attention, memory, decision-making patterns and related processes to the design tools and other devices that minimize errors and increase efficiency of the human operator. It is, therefore, reasonable to consider indigenizing the road symbols as a viable solution that is not only useful in reducing human operator error but also is consistent with international conventions such as the 1968 Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals, the 2007 Accra Declarations on Road Safety in Africa and the 2011 Addis Ababa Recommendations for Safety on Trans-Africa Highways.
Role of ergonomics in re-designing job design in call centres
Published in International Journal of Occupational Safety and Ergonomics, 2021
Cognitive ergonomics, as the name indicates, concerns the mental comfort ability of the employee [13]. Some workers do not like the use of computers frequently for getting their tasks completed, and others might dislike manual work, indicating that theories of human behaviour also intervene at this level [14]. Green and Hoc [15] discuss that perhaps it is more important to establish a relationship between the person who does the job and the person who designs the job. In order to attain optimal results, it is important that both factors are considered. An architect will need both the design and the utility of a building to make a good blueprint of the designed building.