The UMass Center for Building the Science of Symptom Self-Management (UManage) is uniquely poised to develop and implement new technological innovations that empower individuals with chronic conditions to achieve a higher quality of life. For these technologies to produce desirable outcomes (e.g., higher quality of life), we must account for the complex contexts (i.e., sociotechnical systems) within which these technologies will be used. The primary goal of the human factors core is to ensure that project team members account for these sociotechnical factors in their technology designs and evaluations, to better ensure that the technologies are useful, well-used, and produce anticipated benefits. Human factors researchers and practitioners have a well-established framework, termed the Systems Engineering Initiative for Patient Safety (SEIPS), for including these factors in product and process designs. More recently, the SEIPS framework has been expanded (now SEIPS 2.0) to support patient-centered work, such as the management of chronic conditions. Additionally, the human factors field has myriad methods for understanding how individuals complete processes, for identifying areas of opportunity for design, and for creating and testing prototype designs. The human factors core will support UManage via three broad activities: 1) Guidance to pilot project research teams, to better ensure that our pilot projects succeed with respect to human factors considerations 2) Human factors design workshops and educational materials, so the UManage team and interested individuals at UMass and in our community have a solid understanding of the benefits of human factors approaches, and feel competent to choose and apply specific design and evaluation approaches within their work. 3) Guidance to the broader consumer health informatics community, to provide insight about how our team has successfully included human factors methods in the UManage projects.
