RESUMO
Background: Fall risk and incidence increase with age, creating significant physical and mental burden for the individual and their care provider. Lift assistive devices are used in multiple healthcare facilities, but are generally not portable nor self-operational, limiting their use outside of medical supervision. The Raymex™ lift is a novel lift assistance device within a rollator to address these limitations. We aim to gather user-centered feedback on the Raymex™ lift, set up instructions, safety protocols to improve feasibility and usability, and explore the potential usability as a fall recovery or prevention device. Methods: Four older adults, two informal caregivers and 16 formal caregivers (clinicians and continuing care assistants) participated in a focus group. Participants provided feedback on the Raymex™ lift after viewing a demonstration and using the device. Qualitative and quantitative data were analysized using thematic and descriptive analysis respectively. Results: Participants highlighted three major themes: (1) Design features requiring improvement, (2) Positive feedback and suggestions to optimize the Raymex™ lift and (3) Pricing vs. social utility. Participants suggested widening the seat, changing the braking button layout, and lowering the device weight to improve usability. Participants believed the main device feature was fall recovery and had implications for social utility by reducing the need for ambulance visits to the home. Price point led to a concern on affordability for older adults. Conclusion: The feedback gained will advance the development of the Raymex™ lift and may highlight cost-effective design choices for other developers creating related aging assistive technologies.
RESUMO
The Fitts' task is a simple and effective method for evaluating motor capacity that can be used to reveal detailed aspects of visuomotor control when hand and eye kinematics are recorded simultaneously. With advances in technology, the classical Fitts' reciprocal tapping task was modified for use with digitizer tablets and computer screens that require sliding rather than tapping hand movements, which may rely on different visuomotor control strategies. Given the ubiquity of digital devices and touchscreens that often require execution of sliding movements, it is important to compare the underlying visuomotor control and eye-hand coordination involved in reciprocal sliding and tapping movements, which was the aim of the current study. Twelve young adults performed both tasks while their hand and eye movements were recorded. Results revealed motor capacity was significantly higher (p < 0.0001, d = 2.67) in the tapping task (19.62 ± 5.89 bits/s) compared to the sliding task (7.87 ± 2.02 bits/s). Examining hand kinematics showed the deceleration interval was significantly longer in the sliding compared to the tapping task at the lowest task difficulty (ID 2.28: 0.160 s ± 0.026 vs 0.129 s ± 0.017; p < 0.01), which was exacerbated as task difficulty increased (ID 6.97: 0.355 s ± 0.059 vs 0.226 s ± 0.020, p < 0.0001), indicating greater reliance on visual feedback during the sliding task. Examining temporal eye-hand coordination pattern showed that hand movement initiation tended to precede eye movement in both tasks. Overall, the results of this study provide a comprehensive examination of eye and hand kinematics demonstrating salient differences in visuomotor control between tapping and sliding movements. The findings also reveal a novel insight into the temporal pattern of eye-hand coordination for reciprocal tapping and sliding movements, which is in contrast to previous studies that examined discrete (rather than reciprocal) target-directed pointing movements where the eyes typically precede the hand by approximately 100 ms. In conclusion, the current study revealed substantial differences between the two tasks, one major finding being the sliding movements were performed slower compared to parabolic tapping hand movements, which may have implications for designing interactive digital devices and assessment of eye-hand coordination.