Hybrid Decision-Making Management for Material Selection in the Design of Wearable Pressure-Sensing Orthoses in...

Wearable pressure-sensing orthoses are increasingly used in neurorehabilitation to support gait recovery, monitor plantar pressure distribution, and improve patient mobility during repetitive therapy sessions. The performance of these devices depends strongly on the materials used in the skin-contact layer, since material properties influence comfort, flexibility, durability, and force transmission during daily use. This study proposes a hybrid multi-criteria decision-making framework based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and the VIKOR method for material selection in sensor-integrated plantar orthoses. Five candidate materials, ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA), polyethylene (PE), polyurethane (PU), cobalt-chromium-molybdenum alloy (CoCrMo), and polypropylene (PP), were evaluated using five criteria: comfort and skin compatibility, elasticity, fatigue resistance, density, and energy dissipation. AHP was applied to determine the relative importance of the evaluation criteria using expert judgment, while VIKOR was used to rank the material alternatives and identify the compromise solution. The results showed that polyurethane achieved the best overall performance due to its balanced behavior in comfort, elasticity, and fatigue resistance, which are essential properties for long-term wearable neurorehabilitation devices. A sensitivity analysis confirmed that moderate variations in expert weighting did not modify the final ranking. Compared with conventional selection approaches based mainly on isolated material properties, the proposed framework offers a clear and reproducible method for integrating mechanical and user-related requirements into the material selection process for wearable orthoses.