A Critical Review on Factors Affecting the User Adoption of Wearable and Soft Robotics

In recent years, the advent of soft robotics has changed the landscape of wearable technologies. Soft robots are highly compliant and malleable, thus ensuring safe human-machine interactions. To date, a wide variety of actuation mechanisms have been studied and adopted into a multitude of soft weara...

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Autores principales: Ang, Benjamin Wee Keong, Yeow, Chen-Hua, Lim, Jeong Hoon
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10051244/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36991974
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s23063263
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author Ang, Benjamin Wee Keong
Yeow, Chen-Hua
Lim, Jeong Hoon
author_facet Ang, Benjamin Wee Keong
Yeow, Chen-Hua
Lim, Jeong Hoon
author_sort Ang, Benjamin Wee Keong
collection PubMed
description In recent years, the advent of soft robotics has changed the landscape of wearable technologies. Soft robots are highly compliant and malleable, thus ensuring safe human-machine interactions. To date, a wide variety of actuation mechanisms have been studied and adopted into a multitude of soft wearables for use in clinical practice, such as assistive devices and rehabilitation modalities. Much research effort has been put into improving their technical performance and establishing the ideal indications for which rigid exoskeletons would play a limited role. However, despite having achieved many feats over the past decade, soft wearable technologies have not been extensively investigated from the perspective of user adoption. Most scholarly reviews of soft wearables have focused on the perspective of service providers such as developers, manufacturers, or clinicians, but few have scrutinized the factors affecting adoption and user experience. Hence, this would pose a good opportunity to gain insight into the current practice of soft robotics from a user’s perspective. This review aims to provide a broad overview of the different types of soft wearables and identify the factors that hinder the adoption of soft robotics. In this paper, a systematic literature search using terms such as “soft”, “robot”, “wearable”, and “exoskeleton” was conducted according to PRISMA guidelines to include peer-reviewed publications between 2012 and 2022. The soft robotics were classified according to their actuation mechanisms into motor-driven tendon cables, pneumatics, hydraulics, shape memory alloys, and polyvinyl chloride muscles, and their pros and cons were discussed. The identified factors affecting user adoption include design, availability of materials, durability, modeling and control, artificial intelligence augmentation, standardized evaluation criteria, public perception related to perceived utility, ease of use, and aesthetics. The critical areas for improvement and future research directions to increase adoption of soft wearables have also been highlighted.
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spelling pubmed-100512442023-03-30 A Critical Review on Factors Affecting the User Adoption of Wearable and Soft Robotics Ang, Benjamin Wee Keong Yeow, Chen-Hua Lim, Jeong Hoon Sensors (Basel) Review In recent years, the advent of soft robotics has changed the landscape of wearable technologies. Soft robots are highly compliant and malleable, thus ensuring safe human-machine interactions. To date, a wide variety of actuation mechanisms have been studied and adopted into a multitude of soft wearables for use in clinical practice, such as assistive devices and rehabilitation modalities. Much research effort has been put into improving their technical performance and establishing the ideal indications for which rigid exoskeletons would play a limited role. However, despite having achieved many feats over the past decade, soft wearable technologies have not been extensively investigated from the perspective of user adoption. Most scholarly reviews of soft wearables have focused on the perspective of service providers such as developers, manufacturers, or clinicians, but few have scrutinized the factors affecting adoption and user experience. Hence, this would pose a good opportunity to gain insight into the current practice of soft robotics from a user’s perspective. This review aims to provide a broad overview of the different types of soft wearables and identify the factors that hinder the adoption of soft robotics. In this paper, a systematic literature search using terms such as “soft”, “robot”, “wearable”, and “exoskeleton” was conducted according to PRISMA guidelines to include peer-reviewed publications between 2012 and 2022. The soft robotics were classified according to their actuation mechanisms into motor-driven tendon cables, pneumatics, hydraulics, shape memory alloys, and polyvinyl chloride muscles, and their pros and cons were discussed. The identified factors affecting user adoption include design, availability of materials, durability, modeling and control, artificial intelligence augmentation, standardized evaluation criteria, public perception related to perceived utility, ease of use, and aesthetics. The critical areas for improvement and future research directions to increase adoption of soft wearables have also been highlighted. MDPI 2023-03-20 /pmc/articles/PMC10051244/ /pubmed/36991974 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s23063263 Text en © 2023 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Review
Ang, Benjamin Wee Keong
Yeow, Chen-Hua
Lim, Jeong Hoon
A Critical Review on Factors Affecting the User Adoption of Wearable and Soft Robotics
title A Critical Review on Factors Affecting the User Adoption of Wearable and Soft Robotics
title_full A Critical Review on Factors Affecting the User Adoption of Wearable and Soft Robotics
title_fullStr A Critical Review on Factors Affecting the User Adoption of Wearable and Soft Robotics
title_full_unstemmed A Critical Review on Factors Affecting the User Adoption of Wearable and Soft Robotics
title_short A Critical Review on Factors Affecting the User Adoption of Wearable and Soft Robotics
title_sort critical review on factors affecting the user adoption of wearable and soft robotics
topic Review
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10051244/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36991974
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s23063263
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