Towards design guidelines for physical interfaces on industrial exoskeletons: Overview on evaluation metrics

On exoskeletons, physical interfaces with the body are one of the key enabling component to promote user acceptance, comfort and force transmission efficiency. A structured design workflow is needed for any application-driven product, such as industrial exoskeletons. In this paper, we review objective and subjective evaluation metrics that can be applied to physical interfaces. These indexes can be evaluated to create an ordered list of requirements to guide their future design. Pressure magnitude, duration, distribution, direction and time to don and doff are relevant objective indexes related to interfaces. Pain, comfort and ease of operation are subjective indexes. We propose that collecting a suitable set of metrics will lay the foundation for effective design guideline for industrial exoskeletons.