ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the human factors issues associated with patient self-care as an important set of critical activities, particularly in the domain of chronic care. Three human factors considerations can help organize understanding of self-care tasks: signal detection (recognizing important aspects of the environment for focus and effort); situation awareness (incorporating those environmental signals for recognition and projection of future task demands); and usability (performance and satisfaction with tasks and tools). Patients’ ability to increase their signal detection and situation awareness capabilities through self-care tasks represents a form of expertise development that is important in improving health outcomes. Managing chronic conditions and coordinating information among multiple clinicians is also a situation awareness and information-sharing need for patient self-care. Improving device and information usability to permit patients to more effectively detect health signals, understand their health status, and perform self-care tasks can also increase shared situation awareness between patients and clinicians.
