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Forensic Human Factors and Ergonomics (FHFE) is an area of professional practice and scholarship within the field of human factors and ergonomics (HFE) that applies human factors principles, methods, and scientific evidence to the retrospective investigation of accidents, injuries, product failures, workplace incidents, transportation events, and other matters arising in legal, regulatory, and public-safety contexts.

Unlike traditional human factors and ergonomics, which is primarily concerned with the prospective design and evaluation of systems, products, and environments, FHFE focuses on the reconstruction and analysis of events that have already occurred to understand causal factors. Practitioners analyze the complex interactions among people, technologies, tasks, and environments to evaluate systemic, operational, or design elements that may have contributed to a specific event.

The specialty emerged from the broader fields of HFE, accident investigation, and safety engineering, becoming increasingly prominent through its role in civil and criminal litigation, accident reconstruction, and product safety investigations.

The discipline draws its foundational theories from major systemic accidents of the mid-to-late 20th century:

• World War II Aviation: Early HFE emerged when it became clear that military aviation accidents were frequently caused by design failures at the operator-machine interface, prompting initial research into control-display compatibility^[1].
• Nuclear Power Incidents: Events such as the Three Mile Island accident (1979) and the Chernobyl disaster (1986) accelerated research into human error, control room panel geometry, safety culture, and operator mental models^[2].
• Aerospace Failures: The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster (1986) shifted academic focus toward organizational safety culture, corporate decision-making, and structural communication breakdowns within complex sociotechnical systems^[3].

Beginning in the 1980s, FHFE evolved rapidly into legal arenas where experts were called upon to investigate and testify in personal injury, product liability, and wrongful death cases^[4].

By the late twentieth century, the specialty had established a dedicated knowledge base. The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) established the Forensics Professional Technical Group to promote scholarship, professional practice, and peer-reviewed communication among practitioners working in legal and investigative settings.

Forensic experts investigate human performance by evaluating specific cognitive, physiological, and environmental variables:

• Cognitive Factors: Perception, attention, comprehension, situated cognition, situation awareness, expectancy, inattentional blindness, and naturalistic decision-making.
• Physiological & Physical Factors: Biomechanics, anthropometry, tribology (slip resistance), fatigue, and workload assessment.
• Organizational & Operational Factors: Safety culture, safety climate, resilience engineering, hazard communication (warning labels), and training management systems.

The practice of FHFE is generally divided across several domains:

• Transportation: Motor vehicle crashes, trucking operations, railroad systems, aviation accidents, and marine transportation.
• Product Safety: Consumer products, industrial equipment, medical devices, and the adequacy of warning labels.
• Premises Liability: Slips, trips, falls, environmental lighting evaluation, and architectural wayfinding.
• Occupational Safety: High-risk environments including construction sites, manufacturing plants, mining operations, and public utilities.
• Public Safety and Security: Police use-of-force investigations, emergency response coordination, and security screening protocols.

Practitioners apply established scientific and engineering methodologies to reconstruct or understand events:

In United States jurisdictions, admissibility standards impose strict criteria for qualifying expert testimony. Opposing counsel may file motions to exclude or strike expert testimony that fails to meet established statutory requirements.

Under the framework established in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (1993), trial judges act as gatekeepers to evaluate whether an expert's scientific opinions are based on reliable, peer-reviewed principles and methods properly applied to the specific facts of the case. Under the Daubert standard, human factors experts must typically demonstrate that their methodologies have been tested, possess a known or potential error rate, and have gained acceptance within the HFE scientific community.

In jurisdictions continuing to utilize the Frye v. United States (1923) standard (Frye standard), scientific evidence is admissible only if the underlying principles or analytical methods have achieved "general acceptance" within the relevant scientific community.

Critics and researchers within safety science have identified inherent limitations associated with retrospective investigations:

• Hindsight Bias: As articulated by researchers like Baruch Fischhoff, there is a natural human tendency to overestimate the predictability of past events once the outcome is fully known.
• Reconstruction Uncertainty: Investigations may be impeded by incomplete physical evidence, biased eyewitness testimony, and differing methodological interpretations among opposing forensic experts.

• Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) – Forensics Professional Technical Group
• International Ergonomics Association (IEA)
• Chartered Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors (CIEHF)

• Accident reconstruction
• Human error
• Product liability
• Situation awareness
• Swiss cheese model

• Noy, Y. I., & Karwowski, W. (Eds.). (2004). Handbook of Human Factors in Litigation. CRC Press.
• Wogalter, M. S. (Ed.). (2018). Forensic Human Factors and Ergonomics: Case Studies and Analyses. CRC Press.
• Olson, P. L., & Farber, E. I. (2003). Forensic Aspects of Driver Perception and Response (2nd ed.). Lawyers & Judges Publishing Company.
• Woodson, W. E., & Cohen, H. H. (2005). Principles of Forensic Human Factors/Ergonomics. Lawyers & Judges Publishing Company.
• Reason, J. (1990). Human Error. Cambridge University Press.
• Reason, J. (1997). Managing the Risks of Organizational Accidents. Ashgate.
• Leveson, N. (2011). Engineering a Safer World. MIT Press.
• Casey, Steven Michael. Set Phasers on Stun: And Other True Tales of Design, Technology, and Human Error. 2nd ed., Aegean, 1998.

• Cohen, H. H. (2011). Forensic ergonomics: Where we've been and where we're going. Ergonomics in Design, 19(1), 7–12.
• Wogalter, M. S., Laughery, M. S., Vredenburgh, A. G., Deppa, S. W., Lueder, R., & Zackowitz, I. B. (2014). Child injury: Forensic human factors points to the need for better product designs and warnings. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 58(1), 1864–1868.
• Woodcock, K., Diyaljee, Z., & Wogalter, M. S. (2023). Human factors investigation of ejection from a roller coaster. Ergonomics in Design, 33(1).