Medical Instrumentation: Accessibility and Usability Considerations [Book Reviews]

This text is a well-done review of accessibility and usability issues as applied to medical instrumentation. The text is comprised of some 32 chapters separated into five sections. Section One reviews the extent of accessibility and usability problems with a review of specific patient and provider problems. Section Two introduces readers to assessment tools, ergonomic evaluation of devices, example educational approaches to design, video task analysis, and the use of various guidelines. This section is very useful for its teaching material. Section Three emphasizes standards, the benefits of standards, and the payoffs added when usability considerations are not neglected. Section four provides a nice overview of trends in accessibility issues in research and applied areas (such as telerehabilitation, talking books, universal remote controls, wireless technologies, etc.). Section Five is a conference recap and visions section. It is valuable as a "state of the art" and related problems recap. The Text should be considered for a rewrite as a specialty textbook for the teaching of this much-needed material. In the meantime, it is recommended as a reference text for anyone involved in design of medical devices.