Health-care practitioners' stories can aid medical device designers

Storytelling, unlike the more formal interview methods, allows more conversational freedom. Storytellers can provide more detailed information about their personal experiences with a product and recall the unique circumstances associated with each experience. To test this theory, Kim Gausepohl, Woodrow Winchester, James Arthur, and Tonya Smith-Jackson held storytelling and interview sessions with health care practitioners to discuss medical device errors. They found that participants in the storytelling sessions were much more willing to openly discuss HF/E problems that they encountered than were interview session participants.

"Several storytelling participants stayed after the session to chat, and one even followed us to our car to continue chatting," said Gausepohl. "In contrast, no interview participants initiated any after-session chats, and they all appeared to be exhausted at the end, even though they spent the same amount of time in the session as did storytelling participants."

Storytelling as a means to design and develop medical devices has yet to be explored more fully, but Gausepohl and colleagues believe that practitioners' stories could provide useful scenarios to test the usability and safety of products in the absence of observations of product use in real-world settings.

Provided by Human Factors and Ergonomics Society