Usability of an Active Hand Grip Strength Industrial Exoskeleton: A Heuristic Evaluation

In this paper, we report results from a heuristic usability evaluation we conducted of an active industrial exoskeleton used for enhancing hand grip strength. We focused our usability evaluations on four tasks which are critical for successfully using the exoskeleton—assembly, donning, doffing, and disassembly of the exoskeleton. Seven evaluators used a combination of the Nielsen usability heuristics, and Schneiderman’s golden rules, to find usability problems and rate the severity of the usability violations for the four tasks. Results indicate that the visibility of system status, and error prevention heuristics were violated the most.