Evaluation of safety-related performance of wearable lower limb exoskeleton robot (WLLER): A systematic review

Abstract

Wearable lower limb exoskeleton robots (WLLER) have broad development prospects in the military, industrial and medical fields. The intelligent device comes into intimate contact with the human body, and its safety is an essential factor that developers must consider. With the increasing research on the safety of WLLER, its safety test methods and indicators should gradually improve. By examining current test methods and indicators, this study aims to mobilize this information and summarize the most recent safety research. The safety-related studies reviewed in this paper are not limited to evaluating subjects in clinical trials but are concerned with extensive safety research. The focus of our analysis is the test performance indicators. Some functional evaluation indicators are also summarized to explore a broader and more applicable approach on the safety metrics. We found that, in general, most researchers pay attention to the power-assisting performance of WLLER, but the stability and comfort have been largely ignored. At the same time, our analysis also reveals that although there are a wide variety of existing evaluation indicators, uniform and standard test methods and indicators for safety testing of WLLER are still deficient. Based on these results, we identified and discussed several promising research directions that may help the community to attain a widely accepted test method that can objectively evaluate the safety of WLLER.