Usability testing on developed FES device according to the operator perspective

Abstract

The post-paralysis due to stroke, spinal cord injury or musculoskeletal disorder can be restored by rehabilitation. A popular rehabilitation method used today are physiotherapy and therapy using electrical stimulation. Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) is one of the methods of rehabilitation using electrical stimuli, and has been proven to be effective enough to restore muscle function that is weakened due to paralysis. Nowadays, FES devices on the market are designed to rehabilitate only one type of movement and not yet applied wearable and ergonomics design. Meanwhile, the FES devices developed by the laboratory has applied a wearable design and has been able to rehabilitate several movements at once, but not yet for ergonomics design. This study developed a usability instrument and do the usability evaluation for the FES medical devices which is rehabilitate multiple movements on the upper limb. The usability variables chosen for the usability evaluation are simplicity, learnability, memorability, informativeness, and trust ability. Usability evaluation is carried out by distributing questionnaires. Data obtained from the propagation of the questionnaire are processed by statistic method such as average value and standard deviation. The results indicate that the simplicity, learnability, and memorability variables were well applied to the developed FES devices. While the variables informativeness and trust ability dimension are still not properly applied to developed FES devices.