Leveraging user preference in the design and evaluation of lower-limb exoskeletons and prostheses

The field of wearable robotics has seen major advances in recent years, largely owing to an intense focus on optimizing device behavior to accomplish a narrow set of objectives. This approach, however, ignores the end user's perceptions, which are often strongly held and may be key to accepting the technology. Consequently, user preference, which is capable of accounting for factors that are difficult to measure but important to the user, has recently emerged as a formally quantifiable outcome metric. In this perspective, we characterize the methods recently developed and employed to optimize for user preference, describe recent accomplishments in lower-limb wearable robotics research incorporating user preferences, highlight current challenges, and position preference as an important meta-criterion to guide the development of wearable robotic systems.