Limited research has been conducted on hand exoskeletons for an augmentative role. Hand and wrist exoskeletons for therapeutic purposes, however, are widely researched featuring existing technologies which can be adapted for occupational augmentation. This paper presents a literature review of upper-body exoskeleton systems researched within the past five years with a focus on the systematic comparison of augmentative or occupational design compared to other roles. Several important aspects of exoskeleton development for augmentation are identified and evaluated within this review. This includes actuation methods, which determine workspace and scalability, human-robot-interaction, thus ensuring affinity with the wearer, and use of modelling, design optimisation or generative design methods to arrive at effective solutions. This paper systematically reviews 108 upper limb exoskeleton systems and compares their design in three main aspects: The optimisation of their design, their physical features, and the data published to evaluate their effectiveness. Design optimisation in the exoskeleton field faces challenges in parameter choice, lack of integrated personalisation, complex models, computation time, and limited access to effective optimisation techniques. Although there are no perfect combinations of design features, observable trends suggest certain choices are more viable and efficient. The wide range of contemporary hand exoskeleton systems indicates both potential for diverse form factors and a need for further development to converge on a concise solution like that of shoulder exoskeletons.

针对手部外骨骼的增强作用进行的研究有限。然而，用于治疗目的的手和腕外骨骼已得到广泛研究，其特点是现有技术可适用于职业增强。本文对过去五年内研究的上半身外骨骼系统进行了文献综述，重点是增强或职业设计与其他角色的系统比较。本次审查确定并评估了增强外骨骼开发的几个重要方面。这包括决定工作空间和可扩展性的驱动方法、人机交互，从而确保与佩戴者的亲和力，以及使用建模、设计优化或生成设计方法来得出有效的解决方案。本文系统回顾了108个上肢外骨骼系统，并从三个主要方面对它们的设计进行了比较：设计的优化、物理特征以及已发布的评估其有效性的数据。外骨骼领域的设计优化面临参数选择、缺乏集成个性化、复杂模型、计算时间以及有效优化技术有限的挑战。尽管设计功能没有完美的组合，但可观察到的趋势表明某些选择更加可行和高效。当代手部外骨骼系统的范围广泛，表明了不同形状因素的潜力，以及进一步开发的需要，以集中在像肩部外骨骼这样的简洁解决方案上。