Heuristic evaluations of back support, shoulder support, hand grip strength support, and sit-stand support exoskeletons using universal design principles
Year: 2024
Type: preprint
Abstract: Occupational exoskeletons promise to reduce the incidence of musculoskeletal injuries; however, we do not know if their designs allow universal use by all workers. We also do not know how easy the tasks of assembling, donning, doffing, and disassembling exoskeletons are. The purpose of our study was to heuristically evaluate a back support, a shoulder support, a handgrip strength support, and a sit-stand exoskeleton for how well they are designed for universal use when assembling, donning, doffing, and disassembling the exoskeleton. Seven evaluators used universal design principles and associated criteria to independently evaluate and rate four exoskeletons when assembling, donning, doffing, and disassembling the devices. The rating scale was a Likert-type scale, where a rating of 1 represented not at all, and a rating of 5 represented an excellent design with respect to the universal design criteria for the task. The results indicate that providing perceptible information to the user, making the design equitable to use for a diverse set of users, making the design simple and intuitive to use with adequate feedback, and designing to prevent user errors, and when errors are made, allowing the user to recover quickly from the errors, were rated poorly. Assembling and donning tasks presented the most challenges.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Authors: Martinez, Alejandra, Tovar, Laura, Amparan, Carla Irigoyen, Gonzalez, Karen, Edayath, Prajina, Pennathur, Priyadarshini, Pennathur, Arunkumar
Institution: The University of Texas at El Paso
Language: English
Subfield: Biomedical Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: University of Texas at El Paso
OpenAlex ID: W4399317750