From the idea to the user: a pragmatic multifaceted approach to testing occupational exoskeletons

Assessment of occupational exoskeletons should ideally include longitudinal and multistage studies in real working scenarios to prove their effectiveness and sustainability in real in-field contexts and to help generalize the findings for specific scenarios. This work presents a comprehensive assessment methodology implemented as a multistage experimental campaign for rail industry workers using a back-support exoskeleton (StreamEXO). This work demonstrates that a sector/task-specific exoskeleton developed to address work task-specific requirements generates beneficial performance and user experience results. The experimental work in this paper involves collecting data from nine workers over multiple days of testing. During this testing, workers did not report hindrances to their work operations, with an acceptance rate of 86%. In addition, worker fatigue was reduced by 16.9% as measured through metabolic consumption, and 51% when assessed by perceived effort. This work supports the hypothesis that sector/task-specific exoskeletons when tailored to meet the needs of workers and the work tasks can produce demonstrable benefits in real industrial sectors.