Occupational Exoskeletons: Overview of Mental Workload Effects and Assessment Methodologies
DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1007793
archive: archived pipeline: cataloged verified
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Summary
This systematic review addresses the gap in understanding the mental workload associated with occupational exoskeleton use, motivated by a discrepancy between physical benefits and subjective discomfort. While exoskeletons are widely adopted to reduce musculoskeletal disorders and physical load, the authors’ prior empirical study in an automotive manufacturing environment revealed that although deltoid muscle workload decreased by 24.8%, perceived discomfort increased by 68.7%. This divergence suggests that biomechanical improvements do not necessarily translate to overall user comfort, potentially due to unmeasured cognitive or psychological loads. Consequently, this paper aims to map existing assessment methodologies and summarize findings regarding mental workload in exoskeleton research published between 2000 and 2025. The authors conducted a scoping review using the Web of Science Core Collection, identifying 40 studies, of which 13 specifically focused on occupational exoskeletons. The included studies involved 224 participants, predominantly male (129 males, 63 females), with a weighted mean age of 24.4 years. The reviewed literature investigated 17 different exoskeletons, including active and passive devices for back, shoulder, and leg support. Notably, none of the studies were conducted in real industrial environments; 11 were laboratory-based simulations, one used virtual reality, and one employed mixed reality. Mental workload was assessed using a heterogeneous mix of subjective tools, primarily the NASA Task Load Index (NASA-TLX), and objective measures such as electroencephalography (EEG), electrodermal activity (EDA), and performance-based cognitive tasks like reaction time and error rates. The analysis reveals inconsistent and methodologically heterogeneous results. Only one study reported clearly positive outcomes regarding mental workload. Several studies indicated negative effects, such as a 33% increase in cognitive load during material handling with a back-support exoskeleton, impaired attentional performance, and prolonged reaction times. These negative impacts are often attributed to the need for continuous adaptation, conscious system control, and dual-task interference. Other studies reported neutral effects, suggesting that exoskeletons may influence the allocation of cognitive resources rather than increasing absolute mental workload. The findings highlight that most research focuses narrowly on cognitive workload rather than the broader construct of mental workload, which includes emotional load and stress. The review concludes that the current evidence base is limited by small, gender-imbalanced samples and a lack of real-world operational contexts. The predominance of laboratory settings fails to capture real-world stressors such as noise, time pressure, and social interaction. The authors emphasize the need for standardized, comprehensive methodologies that integrate subjective and objective measures to evaluate both physical benefits and cognitive demands. Future research should prioritize longitudinal studies to determine if mental workload decreases with habituation and should explore advanced analytical techniques, such as machine learning, to better understand the long-term psychophysiological impacts of exoskeleton integration in occupational settings.
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| Stage | Outcome | Tool | Model | Prompt | Attempts | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discover | success | Crossref | — | — | 1 | 2026-08-09 |
| archive | success | canonical_url | — | — | 1 | 2026-08-09 |
| extract | success | pdftotext | — | — | 4 | 2026-08-10 |
| clean | success | clean | — | — | 2 | 2026-08-10 |
| chunk | success | chunk | — | — | 2 | 2026-08-10 |
| embed | success | embed | Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B | — | 2 | 2026-08-10 |
| promote | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-08-09 |
| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.6-27b-nvidia | summ-v5 | 2 | 2026-08-10 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 17 | 2026-08-11 |
| verify | success | — | — | — | 2 | 2026-08-10 |
Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-nvidia on 2026-08-10; verification: verified.
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