Unlike earlier generations of medical exoskeletons, which typically require crutches or a walker and rely on pre-programmed, rigid gait patterns, self-balancing designs aim to keep the user upright dynamically, allowing more natural overground movement. That added freedom, however, introduces new engineering challenges: the control system must continuously stabilize the body without the external support of walking aids, and the user must trust that the machine will not tip. Before any device of this kind can move toward clinical deployment, its developers must rigorously assess usability, operational reliability, and safety — which is precisely what this study set out to do.

The evaluation was deliberately structured to capture the experience of both sides of the human-machine partnership: the device users and the trained operators who supervise them. Three adult participants with chronic motor-complete spinal cord injury, with neurological injury levels between T3 and T10 and ASIA Impairment Scale grades A to B, took part in twelve sessions over a four-week period. Six operators, all members of the research team, completed parallel assessments. The protocol unfolded across three distinct phases designed to mirror how a real clinical introduction of the technology might proceed.

In the first phase, participants underwent screening and intake, including anthropometric evaluations and familiarization with the device through a simulator. The second phase focused on physical preparation: fitting the exoskeleton, practicing the donning and doffing procedures, and collecting baseline performance measurements. Only in the third phase did participants begin true intervention exposure, progressing through sit-to-stand movements, overground walking, and tasks drawn from the Functional Gait Assessment, a standardized clinical measure of walking ability. This phased design allowed the researchers to observe how users and operators adapted to the technology incrementally, while documenting every friction point along the way.

Feedback was collected through structured, self-administered questionnaires. Participants rated ease of use, user confidence, and system design, while operators provided their own ratings covering setup workflow, device control, and perceived stability. The results painted a cautiously encouraging picture. Participants reported high usability overall, particularly praising the ease of system setup and expressing strong confidence in the device. Operators rated usability as moderate, reflecting genuine enthusiasm for the device’s rehabilitation potential tempered by real-world difficulties during early familiarization.

Those difficulties are exactly the kind of granular data that beta-stage testing exists to capture. Participants identified several areas needing improvement: the process of transferring onto the device before donning it, the clarity of the device’s messaging on its displays, and the smoothness of movement transitions between different activities. Operators, meanwhile, flagged challenges in device setup, the responsiveness of the joystick controller, and their perception of system stability during early sessions. None of these findings invalidates the technology; rather, they map out the engineering and training priorities that must be resolved before the device can safely leave the laboratory.

The safety findings deserve particular attention, because they illustrate the complexity of deploying powered mobility devices in a population with sensory and motor impairment. Adverse events recorded during the study included skin irritation and bruising — known risks for exoskeleton users, whose insensate skin endures direct mechanical loading from rigid braces and straps. More seriously, one participant sustained a tibial fracture during a sit-to-stand-to-sit transfer. The post-event review concluded that contributing factors were multifactorial and did not identify a confirmed device malfunction. Bone health is a critical concern in chronic spinal cord injury, as prolonged immobilization leads to significant loss of bone mineral density, making even routine transfers a potential fracture risk. This single event underscores why the study’s authors argue that future work must embrace multifactorial risk-mitigation strategies that account for participant-specific factors, training and setup conditions, and device operation as an integrated whole.

The study’s conclusions are measured but optimistic. The Beta 2 investigational prototype demonstrated positive usability from users and showed potential to support rehabilitation-related activities according to operators. The authors recommend that future development focus on improving system responsiveness and operator workflow, alongside the broader risk-mitigation framework. Notably, the manuscript also includes a brief manufacturer commentary contextualizing how the device has evolved, a transparency gesture that reflects the collaborative nature of the project, which was supported by Team I WILL and the UHN Foundation, with equipment and technical support from Human in Motion Robotics under an Innovation Solutions Canada grant.

What makes this pilot study significant beyond its small sample is its methodological honesty. Usability research in rehabilitation robotics often emphasizes performance metrics — walking speed, distance, physiological outcomes — while giving less attention to the lived experience of the humans strapped into the machine. By systematically collecting feedback from both users and operators across a phased protocol, the research team has produced a template for how investigational devices should be evaluated before clinical deployment. The study also acknowledges the people who made it possible: the device users who, as the authors write, bravely participated in this phase I trial and materially contributed to the usability assessment.

The road from investigational prototype to clinically available device remains long, and this study’s findings — from joystick responsiveness to fracture risk during transfers — will feed directly into the next iteration of the technology. But the core message is one of momentum. A self-balancing exoskeleton that users found easy to set up and confidence-inspiring, that operators judged capable of supporting rehabilitation goals, and whose safety profile could be characterized and understood in detail, represents a meaningful step toward a future in which standing and walking are realistic options for people living with paralysis. As self-balancing robotic gait technology continues to mature, studies like this one will define the standards by which the field earns the trust of its users.

Subject of Research: Usability and safety evaluation of a self-balancing overground exoskeleton for adults with chronic motor-complete spinal cord injury

Article Title: Pilot usability and participant experience evaluation with an investigational self-balancing overground exoskeleton in adult users with chronic motor-complete paraplegia

Article References: Tsang, P., Souza, W. H., Walden, T. P., Park, E. J., Arzanpour, S., Dehghani, H., Peykari, B., & Craven, B. C. (2026). Pilot usability and participant experience evaluation with an investigational self-balancing overground exoskeleton in adult users with chronic motor-complete paraplegia. BioMedical Engineering OnLine. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12938-026-01623-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12938-026-01623-5

Keywords: spinal cord injury, exoskeleton, self-balancing robotics, usability, rehabilitation robotics, overground walking, paraplegia, adverse events, functional gait assessment, wearable technology, pilot study, assistive technology

The platform, known as MoDeRa-Ts, short for Decision Support Model for Enhancing Community Resilience in Tsunami-Prone Cities, was developed by Paula Villagra-Islas of the Universidad Austral de Chile and her collaborators, including Cristian Olivares-Rodriguez and Rafael Aránguiz. Its purpose is ambitious: to simulate community resilience across multiple dimensions—physical, social, institutional, and economic—under different tsunami inundation scenarios, and to help urban planners and municipal policymakers move from abstract risk maps to actionable strategies. The research team deliberately set out to answer a question that plagues the rapidly growing field of resilience-assessment tools: do these digital platforms actually work for the people expected to use them?

The literature suggests many do not. Over the past decade, dozens of indices, dashboards, and geographic information system tools have been proposed for measuring community disaster resilience, from composite indicator frameworks to co-created GIS dashboards. Reviews of these tools repeatedly flag the same weakness: a lack of validation with end users. Tools are often built by researchers, demonstrated at conferences, and then quietly abandoned because planners find them confusing, irrelevant, or disconnected from the practical constraints of municipal budgeting and land-use regulation. Villagra-Islas and her colleagues argue that without usability and utility testing, even the most technically elegant simulation platform risks becoming a digital orphan.

To test MoDeRa-Ts under realistic conditions, the researchers organized focus groups with 72 municipal officials drawn from nine representative coastal cities across Chile. These were not students or volunteer panels; they were the professionals responsible for planning, emergency management, and community development in towns where a major tsunami could strike within minutes of a megathrust earthquake. Participants worked with the platform in a controlled environment, completing structured activities that asked them to simulate resilience scenarios, evaluate the tool itself, and explore whether its outputs could be transformed into concrete planning strategies for their own municipalities.

The evaluation followed established, quantitative benchmarks. Usability was measured with the System Usability Scale, a widely used ten-item instrument scored from 0 to 100, in which scores of 68 or higher indicate acceptable usability. MoDeRa-Ts achieved a mean score of 69 out of 100—just above the acceptance threshold. Officials found the platform usable, but they consistently identified the need for a simpler interface, suggesting that the tool’s analytical depth came at some cost in navigability. The researchers treat this result not as a failure but as exactly the kind of actionable feedback that validation exercises are meant to produce: the science inside the platform works, but the packaging needs refinement before broad deployment.

Utility, by contrast, scored strikingly higher. Using the Evaluation Framework for Learning Analytics, a four-level instrument in which items are rated on a 1-to-10 scale and normalized scores above 70 indicate acceptability, MoDeRa-Ts received ratings ranging from 81 to 86 out of 100. Participants reported that the platform effectively helped them understand the information presented, reflect on the multidimensional nature of their communities’ resilience, and identify potential interventions. In other words, the platform did more than display data—it changed how officials thought about vulnerability in their cities, prompting them to consider social and institutional dimensions alongside the physical footprint of tsunami inundation.

The most consequential result emerged from that reflection. Through their interaction with the simulations, the 72 participants collectively identified 45 distinct planning strategies for strengthening tsunami resilience in Chilean coastal cities. The research team organized these strategies into ten Resilient Strategic Planning Themes, covering areas such as evacuation infrastructure, land-use controls in inundation zones, critical facility protection, and community preparedness. This is the step where most simulation tools stall: they can model scenarios elegantly, but converting model output into a portfolio of place-specific interventions requires domain knowledge, local context, and deliberation. The focus-group design appears to have supplied all three, turning the platform into a catalyst for genuine planning dialogue rather than a passive display.

The methodological rigor of the study deserves attention in its own right. Quantitative survey data were analyzed in SPSS, while qualitative responses were coded in Atlas.ti, allowing the team to combine statistical benchmarks with rich thematic analysis. The mixed-methods approach, the authors argue, is essential for evaluating emerging decision-support tools: a high usability score alone would say nothing about whether a tool is useful, and strong perceived utility would mean little if the interface frustrated every user who touched it. By measuring both dimensions with validated instruments, the study offers a template that other developers of resilience platforms—whether for floods, earthquakes, or wildfires—could readily adopt.

The stakes in Chile could hardly be higher. The country’s history is punctuated by catastrophic tsunamis, including the 1960 Valdivia event, the largest earthquake ever recorded, and the 2010 Maule earthquake and tsunami that killed hundreds. Recent research by the same team and collaborators has produced a new generation of probabilistic tsunami inundation maps for Chilean cities, and national agencies have invested in platforms for seismic and evacuation analysis. MoDeRa-Ts is designed to sit downstream of such hazard science, integrating inundation scenarios with resilience indicators so that a planner in a mid-sized port town can see not only how deep the water might run, but how the social fabric, economy, and institutions of the community would absorb and recover from the shock.

What happens next will determine whether the platform moves from validated research to national practice. The findings suggest a clear roadmap: simplify the interface while preserving the analytical engine, embed the tool within the planning workflows of Chile’s national disaster-prevention service and municipal governments, and extend the validation approach to more cities and user groups. If that transition succeeds, the study’s broader lesson will resonate far beyond Chile. In an era when coastal urbanization is accelerating worldwide and climate-driven hazards are intensifying, the bottleneck in disaster resilience is often not the science of simulation but the human science of adoption. By submitting their platform to skeptical scrutiny from the officials who matter most, the researchers have shown how decision-support technology can earn its way out of the laboratory and into the rooms where city futures are decided.

Subject of Research: Validation of a decision-support platform for tsunami-resilient coastal city planning

Article Title: From simulation to urban action: evaluating a decision-support platform for tsunami-resilient coastal cities

Article References: Villagra-Islas, P., Olivares-Rodriguez, C., & Aránguiz, R. (2026). From simulation to urban action: evaluating a decision-support platform for tsunami-resilient coastal cities. Natural Hazards, 122(19), Article 642. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-026-08410-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11069-026-08410-4

Keywords: tsunami, community resilience, decision support, Chile, coastal cities, urban planning, usability, System Usability Scale, disaster risk reduction, simulation, urban, action

The study, conducted by Xiaochen Sun of the School of Product Design at Shanghai Art and Design Academy, examined seven factors that previous literature has linked to how customers perceive an online store: communication quality, usability, information quality, customer service, website design, security, and privacy. While each of these dimensions has been studied individually, the relative weight they carry when measured together against customer satisfaction has remained poorly understood. Disentangling those relationships matters because platforms invest heavily across all seven fronts, often without knowing where each additional unit of design effort yields the greatest return in customer goodwill.

To build the dataset, the researcher carried out a quantitative survey of 400 people, each of whom had made at least one online purchase within the previous four months. Respondents answered a structured questionnaire in which every item was rated on a seven-point Likert scale, a standard psychometric instrument that asks participants to express degrees of agreement, from strong disagreement to strong agreement. Restricting the sample to recent purchasers was a deliberate methodological choice: it ensured that judgments about usability, communication, and design were grounded in fresh, first-hand experience rather than hazy recollections of past shopping episodes.

The analysis pipeline followed the conventions of survey-based behavioral research. All computations were performed in SPSS, a widely used statistical software package. The researcher first tested reliability, confirming that the questionnaire items measuring each construct produced internally consistent responses. The result was striking: Cronbach’s alpha, the most common reliability coefficient, reached 0.959, a value far above the conventional 0.70 threshold and indicative of exceptional consistency across the measurement items. Validity checks followed, establishing that the questionnaire genuinely captured the constructs it was designed to measure.

With the measurement instrument validated, the study turned to inferential statistics. Correlation analysis was used to explore the raw associations between each UX factor and customer satisfaction. An analysis of variance, or ANOVA, was then applied to test whether the observed differences across groups were statistically meaningful. Finally, the centerpiece of the analysis was a multiple linear regression model, a technique that estimates how much each predictor variable contributes to an outcome while holding the other predictors constant. This is the crucial step that separates genuine drivers of satisfaction from variables that merely correlate with it through their relationship with other factors.

The regression model proved statistically significant, with an F statistic of 4.548 and a p value below 0.001, meaning the probability that the observed pattern arose by chance alone is vanishingly small. Within that model, four factors emerged as significant predictors of customer satisfaction: communication, usability, website design, and privacy. In practical terms, shoppers were most satisfied when platforms communicated clearly and responsively, when interfaces were easy to navigate, when visual and structural design felt polished, and when the handling of personal data inspired confidence rather than suspicion.

Just as revealing were the factors that failed to reach significance. Information quality, customer service, and security did not turn out to be significant predictors of satisfaction in this dataset. The finding does not mean these dimensions are irrelevant to e-commerce success; rather, it suggests that they may function as baseline expectations. Modern shoppers may simply assume that product information will be accurate, that help will be available when needed, and that transactions will be protected, so variation in these areas contributes little additional satisfaction once that baseline is met. Satisfaction, in this reading, is won or lost on the experiential frontiers of communication, usability, design, and privacy rather than on the hygiene factors shoppers take for granted.

The privacy result deserves particular attention in an era of intensifying scrutiny of how digital businesses handle personal information. That privacy registered as a significant driver of satisfaction, alongside more classically experiential factors, indicates that data stewardship has crossed over from a compliance concern into the core of the customer experience. For platform operators, the implication is that transparent data practices and respectful handling of personal information are not merely defensive measures against regulators but active contributors to how satisfied customers feel about their shopping journey.

For the e-commerce industry, the study offers a prioritized roadmap. Platforms operating under finite design and engineering budgets can direct resources toward the four significant factors, refining how they communicate with shoppers, streamlining navigation and interaction flows, investing in the aesthetic and structural quality of their sites, and making privacy protections visible and trustworthy. The author concludes that these UX aspects are crucial for e-commerce providers to manage if they want to keep customers satisfied and their platforms effective. As competition in online retail intensifies and switching costs for consumers approach zero, the difference between a thriving marketplace and an abandoned shopping cart may come down to precisely these four dimensions of the user experience.

Subject of Research: The impact of user experience design factors on customer satisfaction in e-commerce platforms

Article Title: The impact of user experience design on customer satisfaction in E-commerce platforms

Article References: Sun, X. (2026). The impact of user experience design on customer satisfaction in E-commerce platforms. Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-026-05121-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12652-026-05121-3

Keywords: user experience, e-commerce, customer satisfaction, usability, website design, privacy, communication, online shopping, regression analysis, survey research, SPSS, consumer behavior

The review, led by Bing Ye of the University of Toronto’s Department of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy, together with James McDonough, Cynthia Chui and Alex Mihailidis, and spanning institutions including the KITE Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, McMaster University and University Health Network, set out to answer a deceptively simple question: what technologies exist to help people find things they have lost at home, and how well do they actually work for the people who need them? An information specialist conducted a broad search across seven major databases — MEDLINE, Embase, Web of Science Core Collection, Compendex, Inspec, IEEE Xplore and the ACM Digital Library — ultimately including 23 records in the review.

What the team found is that the field is dominated by one approach above all others: robot-assisted technology. Home robots equipped with cameras and computer vision systems can be asked, in natural language, to search a living space for a missing item, recognize it visually, and either retrieve it or guide the user to it. Some systems go further, building what researchers call episodic memory models — computational analogues of the way humans remember where they last saw an object. A companion robot that observes its user placing a phone on a kitchen counter, for example, can later answer the question “where is my phone?” by recalling that stored observation. Other robotic platforms combine semantic localization with conversational skills, allowing an older adult to simply ask for help and receive a spoken answer rather than interacting with a screen.

Beyond robots, the review catalogued a diverse ecosystem of tagging and sensing technologies. Bluetooth Low Energy tags attached to frequently misplaced items allow a robot or smartphone to home in on the object’s radio signal even when it is hidden from view inside a drawer or under a cushion. Radio-frequency identification and Zigbee-based systems offer similar functionality with passive or low-power tags. Acoustic approaches such as ChirpTracker use sound signals and a single smartphone to pinpoint the precise location of a tagged object, while HyperEar demonstrated that indoor remote object finding can be achieved with audio cues alone. Wearable camera systems like GO-Finder take a different tack entirely: instead of requiring users to tag their belongings, the device passively observes hand-held object interactions and builds a searchable visual history of where items were last seen.

The way these systems communicate their findings to users emerged as a crucial design dimension. The most common retrieval feedback modality was visual, but the most common combination paired visual and audio feedback — for instance, a robot that points to or photographs the found object while announcing its location verbally. Multimodal feedback matters because users vary widely in sensory ability, cognitive status and personal preference, and the review’s usability findings confirmed that people strongly prefer systems offering multiple feedback channels and personalization options. Performance accuracy also proved central: a retrieval system that fails to find the object, or worse, reports a wrong location, quickly loses the trust of its user.

Yet the review’s most striking conclusions concern what the technology has not yet achieved. Retrieval technology, the authors conclude, remains in its early phase of development, which signals rich research opportunities but also means most systems never leave the laboratory. Usability and privacy, the two factors most likely to determine whether real people adopt these devices, are simply not yet researchers’ priorities. The usability evidence that does exist points to the importance of training support — older adults need structured onboarding to gain confidence with new devices — and to the value of designs that accommodate prior experience and age-related changes in perception and cognition. The authors argue pointedly that usability education should begin early in university curricula, so that the next generation of engineers and designers internalizes the critical role of usability before they ever ship a product.

Privacy looms as an equally urgent concern. Many of the most capable retrieval systems rely on continuous camera monitoring of the home environment, raising obvious questions about surveillance, data storage and consent — particularly sensitive for people with dementia who may not be able to give informed permission. The review identified suggestions for privacy preservation drawn from the literature, including a focus on protecting algorithms rather than raw data, distributed approaches to artificial intelligence that keep processing on local edge devices, and careful attention to the documented privacy and security concerns that shape whether older adults accept Internet of Things technologies in their homes at all. User-centered design processes such as the co-conception approach used in the TROUVE project, which developed a tracking device for older adults with cognitive impairment alongside its intended users, offer one model for reconciling capability with acceptability.

The review also issues a clear methodological challenge to the field: longitudinal studies conducted in real homes. Most existing evaluations are short, laboratory-based demonstrations with small samples, which cannot reveal how systems perform over weeks and months in cluttered, dynamically changing domestic environments, nor how users’ skills, trust and frustration evolve over time. Moving emerging technologies beyond the lab and into the real world is described as essential. The authors further highlight the essential role of policymakers, arguing that collaboration between researchers and policymakers during technology design and development — not after products are finished — is needed to address equitable access to assistive technology, a concern echoed by global health organizations and by Canadian policy research on access to assistive devices.

The stakes of this research are grounded in a substantial clinical literature. Misplacing objects is documented as one of the earliest and most prevalent symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, and studies of people with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s have characterized the symptom in detail through clinical trials and online tracking tools. Research on normal aging shows that memory for item-location associations declines with age even in healthy adults, and surveys of psychogeriatric nursing home residents and their caregivers confirm that losing items is a persistent daily challenge. Caregiver burden, hoarding and hiding behaviors, and the emotional distress associated with lost belongings all amplify the human cost. Because the population over 65 is growing rapidly worldwide, technologies that preserve independence for people with memory deficits have enormous potential public health value.

Ultimately, the review is both a progress report and a call to arms. It demonstrates that the technical building blocks — object recognition, indoor localization, human-robot interaction, wearable sensing and voice interfaces powered by large language models — have advanced remarkably. Systems can now find keys hidden in drawers, answer spoken questions about an object’s whereabouts, and learn from observing daily routines. What remains missing is the human-centered engineering that turns these demonstrations into dependable daily companions: rigorous usability evaluation, privacy by design, long-term home trials, and policy frameworks that ensure the benefits reach the older adults and people with dementia who stand to gain the most. The authors advocate sustained attention and ongoing research in this field, arguing that the seemingly mundane act of helping someone find their glasses may prove to be one of the most meaningful applications of ambient intelligence in the aging home.

Subject of Research: Assistive technologies for locating misplaced household objects, particularly for older adults and people with dementia

Article Title: Help me find it!: a scoping review on technology assisting in locating misplaced objects in a home

Article References: Ye, B., McDonough, J., Chui, C., & Mihailidis, A. (2026). Help me find it!: a scoping review on technology assisting in locating misplaced objects in a home. Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-026-05122-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12652-026-05122-2

Keywords: assistive technology, object retrieval, dementia, home robots, Bluetooth tags, usability, privacy, aging in place, computer vision, memory aids, scoping review, smart home

Researchers at Marche Polytechnic University in Ancona, Italy, recruited 162 university students and immersed them in a virtual jewelry museum built in Unity, viewed through an HTC Vive Pro 2 head-mounted display. The setting was chosen deliberately. Italian museums frequently display small, fragile artefacts such as rings, pendants, brooches and coins behind sealed glass, objects visitors can see but never touch. A virtual jewelry museum is therefore an ecologically valid testbed for asking whether haptic feedback and embodied walking genuinely enrich exploration of artefacts that are otherwise off-limits.

Each participant explored the museum under four conditions in a within-subjects, counterbalanced design. In the baseline configuration, they navigated with a controller and manipulated objects with a controller. In the other three, the researchers swapped in SenseGlove Nova haptic gloves, which deliver up to 20 newtons of force feedback to four fingers by braking cables routed along the back of the hand, a KATWalk Mini-S omnidirectional treadmill that lets users walk in place on a low-friction surface held centered by a waist harness, or both devices simultaneously. Finger position was sampled at 60 hertz with sub-millimeter resolution, and every session began with a calibration and familiarization phase so results would reflect settled use rather than initial learning.

The team measured four pillars of user experience after each condition: presence, the sensation of genuinely being inside the virtual world, assessed with the Igroup Presence Questionnaire; usability, scored with the System Usability Scale; cognitive workload, captured repeatedly with the Instantaneous Self-Assessment scale; and cybersickness, tracked with the Fast Motion Sickness scale. Because every participant completed all four configurations, the data were analyzed with linear mixed-effects models that included a random intercept per participant and Bonferroni-corrected p-values across all twelve statistical tests.

The results dismantle the idea that advanced interfaces uniformly enhance the experience. Haptic gloves significantly reduced perceived usability, with a coefficient of minus 3.59 points on the usability scale compared with controllers, and significantly increased cognitive workload, with a coefficient of 0.23 and a medium effect size of Cohen’s d equal to 0.542, the most practically meaningful effect in the study. Treadmill locomotion, by contrast, significantly reduced cognitive workload, with a coefficient of minus 0.36, suggesting that once users adapt, body-based navigation relies on more automatic sensorimotor routines and frees mental resources compared with controller-mediated movement.

The most surprising finding concerned presence. Neither the gloves nor the treadmill shifted presence on its own, but their combination did, and in the wrong direction: participants wearing haptic gloves while walking on the treadmill reported significantly lower perceived presence than in any other configuration, with a significant interaction effect of beta minus 0.17. The researchers interpret this as a possible ‘coupling cost’: when both locomotion and manipulation are physically and attentively demanding at the same time, small inconsistencies in tracking, latency or action-feedback coupling become more salient, eroding the subjective sense of ‘being there’ even though neither device alone moves the needle.

Observations during testing supported the statistics. Participants needed only a brief adaptation to the treadmill before navigating with relative ease, consistent with the workload benefit. The gloves, however, occasionally misaligned tracked hand positions with actual movements, prompting users to consciously monitor and correct their gestures, while the physical bulk of the devices added discomfort and mental strain. Notably, cybersickness remained low across all conditions, with average Fast Motion Sickness scores between roughly 2 and 3 on a 0-to-20 scale, and neither device, alone or combined, significantly changed sickness levels, though the authors caution that a floor effect may have limited sensitivity here.

The practical implications for museum designers are concrete. Force-feedback gloves should not be treated as a default upgrade; they make sense mainly when tactile manipulation of small or fragile artefacts is the core of the experience, and only with adequate onboarding, calibration support and simplified interaction gestures. Treadmill locomotion can meaningfully ease the cognitive burden of navigation and suits installations where embodied exploration is central, but its space, cost, safety and accessibility demands make it more appropriate for supervised, high-end deployments than everyday museum floors. For novice visitors, controller-based interaction and navigation remain the most robust baseline, and locomotion and manipulation should be co-designed rather than bolted together independently.

The broader message reaches beyond cultural heritage. This study, published in Multimedia Tools and Applications, is among the first to systematically test the individual and combined effects of haptic gloves and treadmill locomotion within a single experimental protocol, showing that findings from studying devices in isolation do not automatically transfer to combined high-embodiment configurations. The relationship between immersion and experience quality appears non-linear: accurate hand tracking, fluid gesture execution and low interaction overhead may matter more to visitors than haptic realism itself. As museums and other industries weigh investments in ever-more-embodied VR, the evidence suggests the right question is not how much immersion can be added, but which trade-offs in usability, mental effort and comfort each addition actually buys.

Subject of Research: The individual and combined effects of haptic gloves and VR treadmill locomotion on presence, usability, cognitive workload and cybersickness in virtual museum experiences

Article Title: More immersion, better experience? The trade-offs of haptic gloves and treadmill locomotion in virtual museums

Article References: Agostinelli, T., Gambelli Fenili, E., & Mengoni, M. (2026). More immersion, better experience? The trade-offs of haptic gloves and treadmill locomotion in virtual museums. Multimedia Tools and Applications, 85(9), Article 754. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-026-21911-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11042-026-21911-5

Keywords: virtual reality, haptic gloves, VR treadmill, virtual museums, presence, usability, cognitive workload, cybersickness, cultural heritage, user experience, immersive technology, locomotion