Human factors engineering is essential to designing medical devices and healthcare products that are safe, intuitive, and effective in real-world use. Join us for a practical, high-level webinar that explores how human factors methods help manufacturers reduce use-related risk, improve usability, and meet regulatory expectations across a wide range of medical technologies. This session will walk through the human factors process from early user analysis through iterative evaluation, showing how these activities support better design and clearer instructions throughout the product lifecycle. Attendees will gain insight into how human factors apply across diverse use environments, including central sterile processing departments, operating rooms, and home-use settings. Examples will span reusable medical devices, capital equipment, and related products such as personal protective equipment (PPE), highlighting how real-world user behavior and workflows influence safety and performance.
The webinar will also explain why human factors are increasingly recommended for products that are reused, reprocessed, or supported by complex instructions. Participants will learn how and where human factors studies are conducted, what meaningful results look like, and how those results can be used to strengthen design decisions, improve instructions for use, and support regulatory submissions. Backed by the combined expertise of Regulatory Compliance Associates (RCA) and Nelson Labs, this webinar will equip attendees with practical insights they can apply to improve product safety, usability, and compliance.
By the end of this webinar, participants will be able to:
• Outline the key steps of the human factors engineering process
• Explain the role of the human factors engineering process in reducing use-related risks
• Describe why human factors studies are recommended for reprocessing of medical devices and how they are conducted.
• Apply human factors practices to improve design, labeling, and regulatory support
