Barriers and Facilitators to the Use of Wearable Robots as Assistive Devices: Qualitative Study With Older Adults and Physiotherapists
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Light wearable robots have the potential to assist older adults with mobility impairments in daily life by compensating for age-related decline in lower extremity strength. Physiotherapists may be the first point of contact for older adults with these devices. Objective: The aims of this study were to explore views of older adults and physiotherapists on wearable robots as assistive devices for daily living and to identify the barriers and facilitators to their use. Methods: Six older adults (aged 72-88 years) tested a wearable robot (Myosuit) and participated in semistructured interviews. A focus group with 6 physiotherapists who had a minimum of 5 years of professional experience and specialized in geriatrics was conducted. Data were analyzed using thematic qualitative text analysis. Results: Older adults perceived benefits and had positive use experiences, yet many saw no need to use the technology for themselves. Main barriers and facilitators to its use were the perception of usefulness, attitudes toward technology, ease of use, and environmental factors such as the support received. Physiotherapists named costs, reimbursement schemes, and complexity of the technology as limiting factors. Conclusions: A light wearable robot-the Myosuit-was found to be acceptable to study participants as an assistive device. Although characteristics of the technology are important, the use and acceptance by older adults heavily depend on perceived usefulness and need.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".