earable passive upper-limb exoskeletons have been proposed and commercialized as tools to improve the ergonomics of workers in repetitive or physically demanding tasks. In the study presented here, an innovative upper-limb exoskeleton is presented, along with experimental tests with human subjects. The device, called proto-MATE, is characterized by two distinguishing design features: a highly ergonomic human-robot kinematics architecture and bioinspired assistance, created to partially compensate for the user's arm weight. Experimental tests investigated the device' s effects on the physical strain of eight upper-limb muscles. These tests also quantified the kinematic coupling between the device and the user by means of specific kinematics-related parameters. The protocol included overhead tasks that are representative of the target application and tasks that generalize nontargeted upperlimb movements and may occur in real working conditions.The results obtained from 15 individuals showed that using the proto-MATE can reduce electromyography (EMG)

The large-scale adoption of occupational exoskeletons (OEs) will only happen if clear evidence of effectiveness of the devices is available. Performing product-specific field validation studies would allow the stakeholders and decision-makers (e.g., employers, ergonomists, health, and safety departments) to assess OEs’ effectiveness in their specific work contexts and with experienced workers, who could further provide useful insights on practical issues related to exoskeleton daily use. This paper reviews present-day scientific methods for assessing the effectiveness of OEs in laboratory and field studies, and presents the vision of the authors on a roadmap that could lead to large-scale adoption of this technology. The analysis of the state-of-the-art shows methodological differences between laboratory and field studies. While the former are more extensively reported in scientific papers, they exhibit limited generalizability of the findings to real-world scenarios. On the contrary, field studies are limited in sample sizes and frequently focused only on subjective metrics. We propose a roadmap to promote large-scale knowledge-based adoption of OEs. It details that the analysis of the costs and benefits of this technology should be communicated to all stakeholders to facilitate informed decision making, so that each stakeholder can develop their specific role regarding this innovation. Large-scale field studies can help identify and monitor the possible side-effects related to exoskeleton use in real work situations, as well as provide a comprehensive scientific knowledge base to support the revision of ergonomics risk-assessment methods, safety standards and regulations, and the definition of guidelines and practices for the selection and use of OEs.

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