Fig. 10

Codes related to the Clinical rehabilitation context (n = 6). This category has codes related to constraints of the clinical rehabilitation context that must be taken into account to ensure the feasibility of deploying exoskeletons within the health care facilities. Clinicians identify challenges related to the organizational capacity of hospitals to implement exoskeletons in rehabilitation such as space availability, high purchase cost and an increase in workload. Most clinicians (70.0%) consider that the use of exoskeletons will result in an increase in the physical and/or cognitive workload of the PT. However, 50% consider that the workload will not increase after they get adapted to exoskeletons as a new tool for therapy. Actually, the only new code in this category is precisely clinicians seeing exoskeletons as a new tool to assist them for physical therapy. Likewise, this is related to the importance of training health professionals to use the devices, a topic that 90% of them expressed. Most of the clinicians (80.0%) were concerned about the ethical issues regarding the selection of the patients that are prescribed to use the technologies, i.e. prescribing them only to patients that can benefit the most with the use of the exoskeletons but leaving out other patients that could still benefit from them, due to the limited devices available and their limited accessibility