What does a user do if his medication is child-proofed, but his illness causes him to have the dexterity of a child?

Design Science principal Stephen Wilcox, PhD, FIDSA, uses quandaries like this to explain why the human factors of medical packaging need to be tested in his article “Human Factors and Packaging: Adventures in Medical Device Usability.”

Written for MD+DI’s Device Talk blog, Dr. Wilcox explains how two recently released FDA draft guidances will affect the way that designers approach medical packaging. He explains they “bring drug labeling and packaging into the human factors orbit in the way that devices have been for several years.”

Medical packaging will now be regulated according to good human factors practices, like text legibility and physical usability. Medical devices have been subject to human factors-based regulation for years, but this is the first time packaging will be put under the same scrutiny.