MSU professor: Medical packaging label design “powerful vehicle” for improving patient health

27 Sep 2021 --- Medical packaging design may not be the most obvious route for improving patient health, but that’s precisely what makes it a rich area to study for Dr. Laura Bix, professor at Michigan State University (MSU), US. 

“Not many people are looking at [packaging design], but it’s ubiquitous and it’s a really powerful vehicle to make a difference in people’s decision making,” Bix tells PackagingInsights. 

Bix leads a research team called Packaging HUB, short for Healthcare Universal Design and Biomechanics, that evaluates patients’ perception, cognition and physical ability to assess whether medical labels are understood correctly. 

Her research team is testing how reshuffling specific medical information on front-of-pack can influence patients’ understanding of medical and over-the-counter (OTC) products, experimenting with change detection technology and eye-tracking devices to do so. 

Inspiration from nutrition labels
Packaging HUB’s research in front-of-pack labels began three years ago, with a primary focus on medical products, but occasionally also researching food and nutrition labels.

“The literature is quite clear in food,” says Bix. By moving nutrients associated with disease, like fats, saturated fats, sugar and salt, to the front-of-pack, people are more likely to attend to information to make better and faster selections that are healthier for them.

Bix says Europeans are “probably very familiar with this strategy in food products.” Indeed, front-of-pack labels, especially the Nutri-Score, have been touted as leading to better-quality food products. 

A diagram of the change detection process (Credit: Alyssa Harben).Hundreds of scientists signed a call demanding the European Commission to imminently adopt Nutri-Score as a harmonized and mandatory front-of-pack label, supported by FMCG giants Nestlé and Danone.

“We know that adverse events are a problem with drugs. We can have drug-drug interactions or drug diagnosis interactions, so if [front-of-pack labeling] is a proven strategy with food, it might be something we can do with OTCs to move some of the warning information to the front,” Bix explains.

How does she do it?
Bix and her research team use change detection technology, hailing from the field of cognitive psychology, to detect perception changes. 

“In a change detection set-up, you make a small change to a stimulus image,” she outlines. The image might be a portion of the warning disappearing, for example. Next, the two images intermittently flash over the other, while a person looks at a computer screen. The researchers then tell them to find the changes in the image.

“Their ability to detect that change becomes a sort of proxy for their attention and their attentional prioritization of the information. It gives us an objective measure of how prominent or conspicuous that information is to them,” Bix explains.

The change detection mechanism further allows the research team to test different design strategies without directing the person to the information of interest – “so you don’t bias them to the warnings to begin with.” 

Eye tracking device
Another experiment Bix’s team is conducting involves eye tracking. This measures whether the eye crosses into the zone of interest. 

“Treatment” designs that the Packaging HUB team is studying using the change detection/eye tracking tech.It also tracks how quickly the eye gets to the product information, how long it spends there, and how often the eye will return to it based on the design strategy.

“We’ll also ask the participants if they think the drug is appropriate for them to take and see if their answer is dependent on whether or not they viewed the information and if the design strategy impacts that as well,” Bix explains.

Ahead of the game?
Packaging Hub’s work is “dramatically different” from most of the work done in the medical packaging field, which tends to focus on the ability to efficiently fill, protect and distribute products. 

In a 2017 blog post, Bix highlighted the limited amount of human factors packaging experts tend to focus their efforts on when marketing products, and how those in other disciplines researching health outcomes rarely use packaging as a means for medical improvement. 

Last month, MSU’s School of Packaging received a US$10 million investment from Amcor to help the school further its academic standards and upgrade facilities.

Watch Dr. Bix explain her research in more detail in a recent PackagingInsights’ video interview here.

By Anni Schleicher