Old Woman’s Hands Deformed From Rheumatoid Arthritis Isolated on White Background
By Dr. Bryce G Rutter, Head of Consulting Services
Arthritis changes how people grasp and manipulate an object, reducing the functional capacity of many adults worldwide; it is one of the most significant considerations when designing combination devices.
Ergonomic Combination Devices for Arthritis Patients
Arthritis significantly impacts how people grasp and manipulate objects, reducing their functional capacity. This consideration is crucial when designing combination devices.
Understanding the User
Designing world-class ergonomic devices for arthritis patients starts with understanding how this user group thinks, feels, and behaves, and how their condition affects their daily lives. Focus on how arthritis impacts tactility, haptic feedback, and dexterity, and how these factors vary with age, disease progression, and co-morbidities.
Using Journey Maps to dissect a typical day-in-the-life of people with arthritis helps identify pain points, observe compensatory life hacks, and spot innovation opportunities. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution, but history in tool design teaches valuable lessons. For example, optimizing an axe’s head mass and handle length for maximum impact varies by stature, similar to how we adapt our grip strategies for different tasks.
Designing for Hands
The hand’s connection to the mind gives us the ability to solve dexterous problems and interface with various touchpoints throughout the day. With over 30,000 sensory receptors under the fingertips, we have a rich sense of touch, texture, vibration, shear, temperature, and proprioception, enabling complex fine-motor tasks—unless hindered by arthritis.
Arthritis strips people of their ability to interact with their world through their hands. With over 100 types of arthritis, osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis are the most common, leading to joint stiffness, pain, deformation, impaired range of motion, and reduced dexterity.
Other key Human Factors to consider include are the impact of fingernails, as well as sizing and fit. Consider both long and chewed fingernails in the design; long nails create uncomfortable upward force on the nailbed when pressing down, while chewed nails lack backing structure, affecting fingertip precision. Additionally, ergonomic design is meant to accommodate different hand sizes, strengths, and dexterity levels. This might sound obvious, but many handheld devices only fit the hand of their designer.
Grasping Strategies
Humans are self-adapting. Arthritis patients naturally migrate their grasping strategies to minimize joint involvement and manage pain. From using all joints in complex grips, they shift to a clamping pincer grip, reducing joint pain.
As the disease progresses, many people’s fingers skew at the metacarpal joints, impacting opposition—the ability to oppose thumb and fingers. This shift affects where to locate control and grasping surfaces, making it crucial to position them within easy reach for arthritic fingertips.
Aging and Skin Fragility
Arthritis often skews to older patients who also have poorer hand health. Aging skin loses adipose tissue, becoming fragile and easily torn. Textures that felt fine as a young adult now feel extreme and create uncomfortable pressure points. Design must account for these changes.
Observation and Ethnographic Research
What patients say they do often differs from their real behavior. Ethnographic research—observing people in their homes—provides valuable insights into usability and innovation opportunities. While time-consuming and expensive, it reveals how people adapt their environment with workarounds and hacks.
Noble’s Approach
Noble has developed a global network of usability and human performance test labs to simulate real-world conditions and quantify the person-product interface. This approach helps in product selection studies, testing instructions for use, and evaluating the designed user experience.
Conclusion
A User-Centered Design Innovation Strategy is key to developing devices that meet the needs of arthritis patients. Ergonomic design focuses on patient experience, ensuring compliance and better healthcare outcomes. This strategy doesn’t ignore cost and manufacturing considerations but integrates them within the overall user experience.
Designing the entire user experience—secondary packaging, patient trainers, instructions, videos, apps, and support— helps optimize patient adherence, reduces time to first injection, and increases prescription renewal, leading to better patient outcomes. This user-centered design strategy is the hallmark of Noble’s Consulting Services and its global Usability Lab network.
Arthritis reduces hand function to that of a toddler. Fingers are weaker and less coordinated, and dexterity is significantly impaired. Understanding how arthritis affects hand function is key to creating ergonomic designs that are intuitive, practical, and aesthetically pleasing. Designs that respect dignity by not looking like medical devices, but rather offer perfect usability wrapped in functional aesthetics, providing visual, tactile, and auditory cues to elicit best practices for self-injection and making the process as painless and efficacious as possible.
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