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.

翻译：职业外骨骼有望降低肌肉骨骼损伤的发生率；然而，我们尚不清楚其设计是否允许所有工作者普遍使用。我们亦不了解外骨骼的组装、穿戴、脱卸与拆卸任务的便捷程度。本研究旨在通过启发式方法，评估一款背部支撑、一款肩部支撑、一款握力支撑以及一款坐站支撑外骨骼在组装、穿戴、脱卸和拆卸过程中，其设计对通用使用的支持程度。七名评估者运用通用设计原则及相关标准，在组装、穿戴、脱卸和拆卸四种外骨骼时分别进行了独立评估与评分。评分采用李克特式量表，其中1分代表完全不符合，5分代表该任务在通用设计标准方面表现优异。结果表明，在为用户提供可感知的信息、使设计对多样化用户群体公平可用、确保设计简单直观并具有充分反馈、以及设计时预防用户错误并在错误发生时允许用户快速恢复等方面，评分普遍较低。组装与穿戴任务面临的挑战最为突出。