Fault Detection, Sensing, and Intelligent Control in Soft Wearable Actuators for Rehabilitation and Motor Assistance: A Systematic Review

Soft wearable actuators offer compliant, lightweight assistance for rehabilitation and motor support, but their translation beyond controlled laboratories depends on reliable sensing, fault management, and adaptive control. This systematic review maps the evidence across three linked domains: fault detection and diagnosis (FDD), sensing, and intelligent control. Owing to marked heterogeneity in actuator types, validation settings, and reported outcomes, the evidence was synthesised narratively and described using publication counts and proportions rather than pooled performance estimates. The study-level supplementary appraisal covers all 106 publications included in the review. Four normative standards were retained within this total as normative context and were marked as not applicable for empirical methodological appraisal; they were not subtracted from the corpus count. Across the 106 included records, 40 were classified as direct, 57 as adjacent, five as indirect, and four as normative context. The FDD subset was especially limited: nine records provided adjacent evidence and five were indirect under the strict soft-wearable rehabilitation criterion. The review therefore identifies soft-actuator-specific FDD benchmarks, multimodal health-state estimation, and fault-aware control as actionable priorities, while distinguishing these structural gaps from constraints expected in a technologically young field. The completed review was retrospectively registered in the OSF Registries on 21 July 2026 using the Open-Ended Registration template.