Background and Aim
Musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) remain a common work-related injury for workers in the healthcare and social assistance sector. Within this sector, the disability industry is recognised as high risk due to the frequency, variability and physical demands of tasks such as client transfers, transport assistance and personal care. To protect both workers and clients, it is important to consider the fit between people, systems and work environments.

In October 2025, SafeWork NSW delivered a statewide compliance program targeting MSD risks, arising from people-handling activities in disability day programs. The compliance program aimed to understand real-world practices, verify person conducting a business or undertakings’ (PCBUs) compliance with work health and safety (WHS) obligations, and strengthen sector capability through education.

Approach
The program was jointly delivered by the Regulatory Engagement and Ergonomics teams, with site inspections undertaken across NSW by inspectors from four directorates within SafeWork NSW.

The focus was limited to disability day program centres, excluding homes and group homes. Inspectors used a verification tool to assess work systems and controls. Where on-site observation was not possible, inspectors adopted a “head office” approach, reviewing documentation to assess compliance.

Results
Twenty-five inspectors completed 41 site visits across NSW, serving nine improvement notices. Common WHS issues included MSD risk exposures, inadequate consultation arrangements, insufficient equipment inspection, and mobile plant and traffic management risks. Overall, PCBUs responded positively, demonstrating improved awareness of regulatory expectations. Inspectors also reported strengthened capability and enhanced cross team collaboration.

Implications
The program highlights how human factors and ergonomics (HFE) principles can shape safer workplaces to protect both workers and clients. Findings indicate that more work is needed to educate PCBUs on MSD risk management, further develop industry resources, enhance cross-regulatory activities, and continue building inspectors’ understanding of HFE principles.

Aim
Globally, research on the gig economy has often focused on digital platforms and gig workers rather than consumers of gig services. This study aims to examine how consumers who engage services through platforms understand, experience, and manage work health and safety (WHS) risks within the complex gig economy.

This study complements a previous study conducted by the research team, which used semi-structured interviews to collect data from key stakeholder groups. It revealed their understanding of the gig economy, perceptions and observations of gig workers’ demographics, hazard exposures, and recommendations to improve health and safety.

Methods
The research team undertook qualitative research using semi structured interviews to collect data from participants and responses analysed using the Nvivo software. An inductive thematic analysis approach was used to explore participants’ experiences, perceived risks, challenges, and strategies used to manage health and safety.

Results
Twenty-seven interviews were conducted with consumers using gig services in Australia. Identified themes included consumers’ understanding of the gig economy, hazards and risks, perceived roles and responsibilities, and recommendations for improving health and safety for both consumers and gig workers.

Discussion/implications
Our findings show that consumers place strong emphasis on personal and family safety when engaging gig workers. While they trust that the gig platforms are “doing the right thing”, consumers continue to play a key role in creating safe environments, often with limited WHS knowledge or regulatory understanding. This may be linked to the uncertainty surrounding employment relationships, blurring the lines between platforms, workers and consumers.

Although some consumers may feel that platforms do provide sufficient information, they are unaware of the gaps and challenges they face due to limited understanding and awareness of WHS issues. These insights inform regulatory discussions and support the need for further research and interventions to protect both consumers and gig workers.

Context: Commercial human factors engineering (HFE) research and practice is fast paced: the imperative to uncover deep, novel insights is coupled with compressed timelines. Engaging HFE and human-centred design (HCD) earlier in product development—ensuring focus on ‘the right thing’—is more critical than ever. While AI tools are useful to augment data analysis, a need remains for gathering original real-world data to support high-quality insights.

Aim: IDE Group built a state-of-the-art facility for conducting medical device HFE testing. We hypothesised that a custom space would improve insight generation and problem solving through onsite access to usability and user experts, enabling development of medical devices with superior fit-for-purpose.

Approach: Our approach to HFE/HCD combines evidence-based best practice with commercially-oriented impact, coined ‘Pragmatic Usability’. SULi (the Simulation Usability Lab & Innovation center) opened in 2025, featuring a versatile lab space reconfigurable into contextual simulation suites representing clinical workflows and environments in high-fidelity. To bridge the gap between HFE research and product development, we intentionally integrated both.

Results: SULi has been seamlessly integrated with IDE Group’s design and development studio, providing a unique environment for human factors research and evaluation that feeds directly into the medical device design process—reducing friction between development and testing and increasing speed to insight. This integration enables rapid, iterative feedback loops that compress timelines without sacrificing rigour.

Implications: Creating a space for best-practice HFE testing and HCD excellence to coalesce—within the same ecosystem—allows insights to be applied almost immediately to design strategy. The right environment for patient-centred product development enables generation of realistic, high-quality, scenario-based use data as design input. This, in turn, allows for the challenging of assumptions and the rapid identification of key issues and opportunities to drive safer and more desirable solutions that are closer than ever to ‘the perfect fit’.

Goodness in Design “The Human Factors Attribute”

What is “Goodness” in Design from a human factor’s perspective? A lot of work by many practitioners is often expended addressing human factor and ergonomic issues with installed systems, these issues often only emerge with operational experience. The challenge facing designers of different systems is to identify and evaluate the human factors “attribute” of the design. Systems architects and engineers apply well developed methods of Trade Space Exploration to evaluate the “Goodness or the Perfect Fit” of a design by weighting multiple attributes that position the best designs along a Pareto Front using a Design Value Loop to optimise both performance and resource parameters to deliver the optimal value model. During the design of a radiopharmaceutical facility human factors integration is a key element of the licencing and approval process, the challenge for the design team is to characterise and assess the human factors attribute to deliver the optimal design for best practice in nuclear medicine manufacture.
This paper examines a design optioneering process and how different human factors attributes contribute to identifying an optimal design. The paper considers processes for identifying, characterising and integrating the “human factors attribute” into the design process. By applying concepts of Multiple Attribute Utility Theory” and weighting productivity, safety and error reduction human factor aspects in the early design process the designer can optimise and demonstrate a level confidence that health and safety risks have been reduced ALARP. The objective of this paper is to describe “goodness” of design in getting as close to “The Perfect Fit” in human factor terms.

In addition to their contribution in addressing a range of societal challenges, drones present an opportunity to significantly increase the accessibility of aviation. Drones enable people with disability to access a range of aviation careers that traditional, crewed aviation may not afford due to medical requirements or physical constraints. Realising this potential for inclusion necessitates a consideration of instructional and information design, and access to the physical space to enable drone training for persons with disabilities.
The aim of this project is to understand the factors that must be considered in the design and delivery of drone flight training for people with disabilities, and examine how drone flight training can be made more accessible.
A task analysis of a common exemplar of drone flight training in Australia was developed by the research team through observation and interview. It included consideration of the accessibility of outdoor physical training environments, noise and sensory elements of drone flight training, commonly used drone equipment and control interfaces, and training task and competency assessment methods.
Critical elements of the task were identified through interviews with people with disability who have drone flying experience and people who have experience of conducting drone flight training.
The task analysis will inform drone training activities to make them more accessible, and facilitate a more positive and successful learning experience for persons with disabilities. The task analysis will also be able to guide other training providers regarding considerations in making drone flight training as accessible as possible.

Aviation training is increasingly competency-based and evidence-driven, yet instructors and training organizations face rising complexity: richer scenarios, limited instructor bandwidth, variable trainee needs, and the risk that automation reduces learning rather than strengthens it. Agentic AI—systems that can plan, act, and coordinate toward training goals—could transform training design and delivery, but may also introduce new failure modes (misleading feedback, over-trust, goal drift, opaque rationale). This study aims to define and evaluate human-centred design principles that create a “perfect fit” between trainees/instructors and agentic AI across the training lifecycle: scenario authoring, in-session coaching, and post-session debrief.
We propose a mixed-methods Human Factors and Ergonomics program: (1) cognitive task analysis with instructors, examiners, and trainees to map “work-as-done” in briefing, observation, intervention, grading, and debrief; (2) design of an agentic training assistant with bounded autonomy modes (observe-only, suggest, act-with-approval), uncertainty-aware reasoning, and evidence-linked feedback grounded in simulator data/events; (3) controlled evaluations in high-fidelity simulator sessions (e.g., LOFT, abnormal/emergency procedures, threat-and-error management) comparing three conditions: instructor-only, conventional decision support, and instructor + agentic AI. Outcomes include learning gain on competency markers, transfer to novel scenarios, debrief quality (coverage, specificity, actionability), workload (NASA-TLX), situation awareness probes, trust calibration, and safety-relevant errors (commission/omission, negative training indicators).
We expect instructor + agentic AI to improve personalization, scenario adaptability, and debrief specificity, while risks concentrate around explanation quality, incorrect attributions, and over-reliance by novices. We anticipate identifying fit-critical patterns: contestable recommendations, standardized intervention/handover cues, and “show-your-work” debrief traces tied to observable events.
Findings will inform governance and assurance for agentic AI in safety-critical training: instructor-in-the-loop oversight, auditability, data provenance, and safeguards against negative training. The resulting framework operationalizes “perfect fit” as calibrated autonomy, shared situation awareness, and accountable coaching—scalable across airlines and training centers.

Compliance with engineering standards is often treated as a proxy for good design. In complex socio-technical systems, designs can comply with standards while still creating conditions that increase human error, increase workload, and degrade human wellbeing and performance. This is because Standards apply fixed solutions to a wide variety of contexts, organisations, and ways of working.
This talk aims provide HF practitioners with the confidence to challenge designers to go beyond compliance; to reframe standards as a minimum baseline rather than a marker of good design, and to truly achieve human centric design outcomes.
This lightning talk gives a confronting demonstration of where a compliant design had failed to adequately account for real-world use. The Presentation will speak to an image of a poor design outcome on a Melbourne metropolitan station upgrade project. The depicted staff level crossing across active rail lines is technically compliant, but clearly unsafe. The crossing is used by staff only and the standard assumes a higher level of rail safety awareness. When exiting the station back of house offices, staff would walk (or trip) down three steps onto an active railway line. Mitigations via push gates did not address the underlying problems with the design, and a reconfigured walkway was created to allow staff the time to adjust to new environmental cues and to adjust their level of vigilance.
Achieving “the perfect fit” requires moving beyond compliance-driven design toward deeper integration of human factors to identify where assumptions embedded in standards diverge from actual operational conditions, context and user behaviour. Standards should be treated as a foundation, complemented by context-specific analysis and validation of how roles, tasks, and interactions evolve in practice.

Background and Aim
Technology is used to support first responders and civilians for effective decision-making and the management of disasters, particularly when they display volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) characteristics. Despite there being established evidence on the design, benefits and accuracy of disruptive technologies that augment human decision making, there is no universal framework that supports the adoption and utilisation of technologies that can significantly disrupt existing systems, workflows, and decision making practices, in these environments. This review aimed to map the intersection of disruptive technology with human adoption and implementation to develop a universal framework.

Methods
Following PRISMA guidelines, the protocol was registered with Open Science Framework (10.17605/OSF.IO/DE2FN). Six databases [PsycInfo, EBSCO Academic Search Premier, IEEE, Scopus, Web of Science and ProQuest Military Database] were searched in October 2025. Studies investigating implementation of disruptive technologies and factors influencing human adoption in VUCA disaster management settings were included.

Results
Of 3,561 articles identified, 53 full-text articles were assessed and nine studies met the inclusion criteria. Preliminary findings indicate that individual factors, including personality, trust in automation, and user experience, alongside technology design features such as ease of use, mobility, and emotive design, influence successful adoption. While substantial literature examines the exploration, development and testing of disruptive technologies in simulated or artificial settings, few studies evaluate real-world implementation or intervention outcomes.

Discussion and implications
This review highlights a significant evidence gap regarding factors influencing successful implementation of disruptive technologies in real-world VUCA environments, including barriers and enablers to adoption. The gap in evidence suggests that future research should focus on the development of a framework to support the ongoing design, implementation and evaluation of these technologies. This will ensure they are fit-for-purpose for individuals, organisations and systems, and support rather than hinder emergency responders.

Context
Horses are large, reactive animals whose behaviour can shift rapidly in response to stimuli — weather, nearby horses, noise, and even their handler — all largely beyond anyone's control. In a busy urban stable open to the public, this unpredictability intersects with a wide and varied human population: experienced riders, first-time visitors, children at birthday parties, and casual visitors, including people with special needs.

Aim
Designing safety systems for such an environment is not simply identifying hazards; it requires fitting those systems to a complex, living sociotechnical whole.

Approach
This presentation draws on direct experience at a public-access equestrian facility where horses are ridden and handled across stables, arenas, and shared parkland. Physical hazards for workers are substantial: equine-related tasks, manually handling heavy items, working from heights, loading and unloading trucks carrying feed and shavings, and weather-dependent machinery that may mean tasks are completed manually. Farriers, veterinarians, dental practitioners and riding coaches work in close physical contact with animals that may become reactive without warning. Rider and horse injury adds a further layer of acute, unplanned risk.

Results
The organisational layer presents its own distinct human factors challenge. Decision-making authority often sits with staff who have limited equestrian knowledge, and end-users — those working with horses — are not always meaningfully consulted. Work design changes and introduced modifications can occur without adequate user consultation, producing divided outcomes among those who use and work in the space. The facility also exhibits the informal social structures common to small, close-knit workplaces — loyalty networks, unofficial hierarchies, and personality-driven decisions — all of which complicate efforts to introduce systematic safety improvements.

Implications
Safety will only improve when systems are designed to fit their full sociotechnical environment — accounting for unpredictability, diverse users, physical demands, and the organisational culture that shapes everyday decisions.