UsabilityNJ World Usability Day - Speaker Information

Below is a brief bio of Edmond Israelski and an abstract of his talk to be given at the UsabilityNJ World Usability Day Celebration on November 14, 2006.

Edmond Israelski Biography

Edmond W. Israelski PhD, CHFP is human factors program manager at Abbott, a medical device and pharmaceutical company. He joined Abbott in 2001, where he leads a cross-division team to imbed best-practice human factors design methods into all of Abbott's products, to ensure safety and usability. He does this through hands-on design and evaluation of key new products, training internal resources and facilitating the use of outside professional HF resources.

Ed is co-chair of the AAMI Human Factors Engineering committee, which develops HF standards for medical devices. He is also an active contributor to JWG4 with IEC and ISO in developing international HF standards. He is a certified human factors professional CHFP. He has authored fourteen book chapters and numerous articles in the area of human factors. Ed holds fourteen patents. He is a fellow of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society and a member of APA, UPA and the National Academy of Sciences Committee On Human-System Design Support For Changing Technology.

He has worked as a systems engineer, product manager, market researcher, industrial/organizational psychologist as well as a human factors engineer. He was technical manager of the human factors systems group at Lucent Technologies - Bell Labs, formerly AT&T. Later he was director of HF for SBC/Ameritech where his organization supported the design and evaluation of user interfaces for telecommunications products. In 2000, he became chief technology officer at Human Factors International, a user interface design and consulting firm in information technology. He received a B.S. in electrical engineering from New Jersey Institute of Technology, an M.S. in operations research from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in industrial and engineering psychology from Stevens Institute of Technology.

Talk Abstract

Application of Human Factors Engineering to Medical Product Design to Enhance Patient Safety

Dr. Israelski will discuss how the user centered design process is applied to the design of medical products and devices. In particular, he covers what is unique in the design control process, such as conducting formal risk analysis and maintaining an auditable design history file. Because of the safety critical nature of medical products the design control process for system development is regulated.

The Institute of Medicine estimates almost 100,000 annual deaths in the US due to medical errors, some of which can be attributed to poor human factors in design. There are a number of standards that are recommended by regulators to ensure the proper use of HFE in product design. Standards from ANSI, AAMI, ISO and IEC are described. The presentation will cover how Abbott incorporates HFE in its product development process and will show several examples and case studies.