Heuristic evaluations of back support, shoulder support, hand grip strength support, and sit-stand support exoskeletons using universal design principles

TL;DR

This study heuristically evaluates four occupational exoskeletons for universal usability, focusing on assembly, donning, doffing, and disassembly, revealing design shortcomings in information clarity, simplicity, and error prevention.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic evaluation of exoskeletons using universal design principles, highlighting areas for improvement in user-centered design for diverse workers.

Findings

Poor ratings in perceptible information and equitable use

Assembly and donning are the most challenging tasks

Designs often lack adequate feedback and error recovery features

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.