Abstract Background With increasing social pressure and an accelerating aging population, mental health issues have become a global public health challenge. According to the World Health Organization, approximately 10% of the global population suffers from varying degrees of anxiety or depression, with over 300 million individuals experiencing moderate to severe symptoms. Traditional psychotherapy relies on professionals, leading to resource shortages and long waiting times. Rehabilitation assistive devices, as an emerging non-pharmacological intervention, can provide continuous and personalized psychological support through real-time physiological signal monitoring, human-computer emotional interaction, and adaptive motor assistance. Optimizing these devices from an ergonomic perspective is crucial for improving user comfort, reducing anxiety, and enhancing treatment adherence. This research aims to develop rehabilitation assistive devices suitable for patients with anxiety and depression through innovative ergonomic design and to verify their practical effects on improving mental health indicators, providing a novel technological solution for the field of mental rehabilitation. Methods This study recruited 150 clinically diagnosed adult patients aged 18–65 years with depressive disorders. Participants were randomly assigned to an intervention group (n = 75) and a control group (n = 75). The intervention group used ergonomically optimized rehabilitation assistive devices for 12 weeks, 5 days a week, 60 minutes a day. The devices integrated real-time monitoring of multimodal physiological signals and emotion regulation guidance programs. The control group used commercially available rehabilitation robots. Mental health was assessed using the Self-Rating Anxiety Scale (SAS) and the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC) at pre-intervention (T0), week 6 (T1), and week 12 (T2). Device usage time, interaction satisfaction, and changes in physiological indicators were also recorded. Repeated measures ANOVA was used for statistical analysis, with a significance level set at p.05. Cohen’s d effect size was calculated to assess the intervention effect. Results As shown in Fig. 1, the total SAS score in the intervention group decreased from 62.8 ± 7.3 in T0 to 45.6 ± 6.1 in T2 (p.001, d = 2.51), while the total CD-RISC score increased from 58.2 ± 9.4 in T0 to 78.9 ± 8.2 in T2 (p.001, d = 2.37). Significant improvements were observed in the somatic symptoms, fear tendency, and anxiety sub-items of SAS in the intervention group (p.01). The intervention group showed significant changes at T1, with further improvement at T2. In contrast, the control group showed only slight improvements in SAS and CD-RISC scores between T0 and T2 (p.05), with a small effect size (d 0.8). Discussion After 12 weeks of intervention with rehabilitation assistive devices based on innovative ergonomic design, the mental health of depressed patients significantly improved, manifested as a marked reduction in anxiety and depressive symptoms and a significant increase in psychological resilience, outperforming the control group using conventional devices. This result indicates that optimized rehabilitation assistive devices can improve device affinity and treatment adherence, leading to better psychological rehabilitation outcomes. This study provides empirical support for the in-depth application of ergonomics in the field of mental health. Future research could explore combined application models of personalized design parameters for different populations to promote the industrial application of rehabilitation assistive devices in promoting mental health. Funding No. CSTB2025TIAD-STX0017.
Yong Jiang (Sun,) studied this question.