Recent advances in the rapidly growing field of soft robotics highlight the potential for innovations in wearable soft robotics to meet challenges and opportunities affecting individuals, society, and the economy. Some of the most promising application areas include wearable haptic interfaces, assistive robotics, and biomedical devices. Here, we review emerging advances in wearable soft robotic technologies and systems, including numerous examples from prior research. We discuss important considerations for the design of such systems based on functional concerns, wearability, and ergonomics. We describe an array of design strategies that have been adopted in prior research. We review wearable soft robotics applications in diverse domains, survey sensing and actuation technologies, materials, and fabrication methods. We conclude by discussing frontiers, challenges, and future prospects for soft, wearable robotics.

Integration of soft haptic devices into garments can improve their usability and wearability for daily computing interactions. In this paper, we introduce PneuSleeve, a fabric-based, compact, and highly expressive forearm sleeve which can render a broad range of haptic stimuli including compression, skin stretch, and vibration. The haptic stimuli are generated by controlling pneumatic pressure inside embroidered stretchable tubes. To ensure a suitable grip force, two soft mutual capacitance sensors are fabricated and integrated into the compression actuators, and a closed-loop force controller is implemented.

Conformable robotic systems are attractive for applications in which they may actuate structures with large surface areas, provide forces through wearable garments, or enable autonomous robotic systems. We present a new family of soft actuators that we refer to as Fluidic Fabric Muscle Sheets (FFMS). They are composite fabric structures that integrate fluidic transmissions based on arrays of elastic tubes. These sheet-like actuators can strain, squeeze, bend, and conform to hard or soft objects of arbitrary shapes or sizes, including the human body.

In healthy individuals, quadriceps act as dampers which stabilize the knee joint and also produce extension motion of the leg during walking. However, in the case of individuals with paresis after a stroke, generation of the required knee-extension moment, so as to perform common mobility tasks, is partially lost. This paper presents the design, development and preliminary evaluation of a soft-inflatable exosuit for knee rehabilitation with soft-inflatable actuators made of heat-sealable thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) materials.

Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (CTS) affects roughly 3%-6% of the working population ages 18-64. This affliction is caused by applying stress on the median nerve that is routed through the carpal tunnel while it is at a positive or negative angle, greater than 15 degrees in either direction, to the human wrist. The goal of this work is to design a wearable, soft-actuated, robotic sleeve that will dynamically adjust the position of the wrist in real-time to a neutral angle to prevent or release CTS strains.

A key challenge in robotics is to create efficient methods for grasping objects with diverse shapes, sizes, poses, and properties. Grasping with hand-like end effectors often requires careful selection of hand orientation and finger placement. Here, we present a fingerless soft gripper capable of efficiently generating multiple grasping modes. Our findings show how a fingerless soft gripper can efficiently perform a variety of grasping operations. Such devices could improve the ability of robotic systems to meet applications in areas of great economic and societal importance.