# Implementing Ethical, Legal, and Societal Considerations in Wearable Robot Design
## 1 Introduction
### Desiderata for the Translation of ELSI Guidance into Domain-Specific Practice  
However, what all the approaches and guidance documents outlined in the previous sections have in common is that their ELSI recommendations remain at a fairly high level of generality. As discussed, they focus predominantly on (i) identifying procedural elements for the integration of ELSI considerations in tech design and (ii) providing a framework of general normative guidance. Making principles practically meaningful is challenging. While all approaches discussed here make substantial efforts towards operationalising the process elements and normative principles to make them more practical, the generality of their application comes with the cost of lower applicability to specific domains. The successful creation of domain-specific guidance requires more than a straightforward top-down application of general principles to a specific application domain. Instead, it needs to be informed and shaped by the particular characteristics of that domain that give rise to unique constellations of concerns. Whether domain-specific guidance can be created frequently depends on whether a meaningful dialogue has taken place between those with substantial experience of robot development in the field and those with a broader understanding of ELSI concerns, for example, through a careful review of ELSI literature, through standardization processes or other forms of direct engagement with stakeholders and policymakers [36; 37]. Such a process does not just involve the selection of relevant principles from a pre-existing set of principles but frequently also includes the emergence of considerations that may not have been part of the prior conceptual framework. Domain-specific guidance is significantly more developed in some robotics domains than in others. The interests of ELSI scholars and practitioners in a field are not always aligned, insofar as theoretically interesting ethical concerns may appear unrealistic and therefore not practically relevant to technology developers. Attention has also tended to be drawn towards societally more prominent uses, such as the use of self-driving vehicles, or overtly ethically challenging domains, such as the use of social robots for the care of vulnerable people. This has led to the comparative neglect of others that may appear less intuitively problematic but may nevertheless raise important ELSI questions, such as industrial robots or WRs. Guidance on specific aspects, such as guidance on the autonomy levels of robots, can also be well developed in certain domains, for example for driving automation, while still lagging behind on others, for example, medical robotics [38; 39], ELSI-sensitive design guidance for WRs has received particularly low levels of attention in the literature so far. As an exemption, exoskeletons received attention in a guidance document for research that possibly facilitate human enhancement [40]. However, ELSI of WRs conform to more than implications for possible human enhancement, as the next section will demonstrate. ELSI Considerations for Wearable Robots: Methods Followed for Selecting Domain-Specific Principles and Core Concepts  
While the above methodologies, documents, and resources provide general guidance on ELSI considerations' inclusion into the technology development process, they may appear somewhat removed from WR development's specific characteristics and challenges. This section provides a brief overview of relevant ELSI considerations for WRs, as developed in more detail in [PERSON] and colleagues [5] (It should be noted that the funders' requirements required that military applications be excluded from consideration). Using findings from both expert opinion (from three separate workshops) and a literature review, the authors classified 12 important ELSI into subjective (WR and the self), interpersonal (WR and the other), and social dimensions (WR and Society). These findings resulted from different workshops organized under the Cost Action 16116 on Wearable Robots.