A Current Review of Human Factors and Ergonomic Intervention With Exoskeletons

Uses And Markets

In today’s market, exoskeletons are broadly placed into two primary functions: (1) rehabilitation and (2) human performance augmentation. The recent surge into exoskeleton design, research, and manufacturing has led to their use into other fields like firefighting, sports, and law enforcement. The number of journal and conference papers covering exoskeletons each year has grown exponentially from just over 100 in 1964 to well over 7,000 in 2016. The number of publications on the term ‘exoskeleton’ is most likely skewed for years prior to the 1990’s where the term was more often associated with the traditional sense of the word – that is, a rigid external covering for some invertebrate animals like arthropods.

Rocon (Rocon, E. et al. 2007) and Harwin (Harwin, W., Leiber, L., Austwick, G., and Dislis, C., 1998) classify rehabilitation robotics (and by extension rehabilitation exoskeletons) into three categories: