I am pleased to introduce Empathy Medical and I would like to take you all through a journey to reveal how it came to be what it is today.
It has been quite a ride since I first started digging into the marbles of Human Factors Engineering! Human physiology and the connection to the outside world, the fact that there are little to none limitations to what are our mind capabilities are, was something of an attraction to me, which I developed in the late school years.
As I travelled through university, delving into the depths of biomedical engineering, I found myself even more curiously lost in the vast oceans of science, human physiology and engineering.
To start from public healthcare sector was absolutely vital, there I witnessed first-hand how medical devices were handled by its users. The struggles I have seen, the complains I have endured, and the callouts I have investigated… At that time, it was little that I could help with, but I could see the potential and it was driving me crazy.
All of this pushed me to transition to the private sector, to get a better understanding, to be – more involved. With a completely different load of experience but with no luck to make the manufacturers listen what their product users have to say, I decided to continue my search and that is when, I discovered human factors engineering.
It was exactly the right discipline. I could finally flourish and use all my theoretical, field based and back end of medical device development experience that I gathered throughout the years.
It helped me to develop skills that I use up to this day. Discover the secrets of the medical technology and its treatment subjects. Listen to users during preparation, escalation and post-study stages. Understand the roots of the problem and if not, ask WHY? Until you are comfortable to build the root cause story. Analyze the generated quantitative and qualitative data, and report back to the brilliant minds that shape the health care of tomorrow.
And this is just a glimpse of the set of skills that one can develop along the way, while working as a Human Factors Engineer. Through the interactions with different type of users in various scenarios, not only patterns in design challenges arise, but also user behavior becomes clear and predictable. Eventually, even user personalities appear as something well known. This exposure enriches and amplifies empathy skills by a great deal.
As you can see Empathy was and is a very close companion of mine, which has helped and still is helping to shape my actions from the perspective of the affected. It is a fundamental tool when it comes to Human Factors and Usability Engineering and it is the key to every successful study interview.
Empathy Medical is young but she is definitely equipped with right tools to assist Medical Device and Drug Device Combination manufactures to extract the right information and to ensure that each marketed device brings its full potential when it comes to safety and effectiveness.
The most precious things start from the black board…