A review on the design of assistive cable-driven upper-limb exoskeletons and their experimental evaluation

Upper-limb exoskeletons (ULEs) have the potential to assist severely paralyzed individuals. Many rehabilitative upper-limb exoskeletons have been developed in the recent years, where the prominent issue of bulkiness and actuator placement has been effectively resolved by the cable-transmission systems, allowing the actuators to be mounted away from the joints. This results in increasing the compactness and wearability of the exoskeleton. Thus, this article summarizes twenty-five cable-driven upper-limb exoskeletons designed for rehabilitating disabled individuals. This paper also presents a comparison based on usability of ULEs by end users considering the design characteristics and user-based experiments for real-time applications of the arm exoskeletons.