Saskia Baltrusch

238 Chapter 9 end-users were involved to study the potential of an exoskeleton for rehabilitation and prevention. The starting point was a qualitative approach, conducting a focus group study with health care professionals and low-back pain patients. In the benchmark testing and the iterative testing of the SPEXOR system, I included employees, working in load-handling professions, to test the effect of the exoskeleton on objective and subjective outcome measures. As a last step, a mixed method approach was chosen, including a subgroup of employees who took part in the iterative testing and their managers. This involvement of potential end-users at an early stage, during iterative testing and at the end of the evaluation had an important and significant effect on both, the exoskeleton design and the study design as described below. Figure 1: End-user involvment at different stages of the thesis. Symbols are adapted from METACOM Symbole © Annette Kitzinger. Effect on Exoskeleton design By involving end-users before the development phase and listening to their thoughts on using a passive trunk exoskeleton, I was able to identify design requirements as early as possible. In that way, these results could be matched with requirements from theoretical biomechanical and engineering considerations to determine exoskeleton design. One important feature that