**7. Conclusions**

This article present the transformation from the given challenges (industrial and demographic) to an e ffectiveness production by using exoskeletons for human-centered workplaces as motivation. The challenges—a need of more flexibility and productivity for production systems, but on the other side, demographic change and health issues from a human perspective—are transformed by three identified relevant research questions. The answers are given in the following sections.

The first question, "where and which technology?", is answered by a methodology, called ExoMatch in chapter 3. A deep analaysis of exoskeleton technology and workplace environments is used to formulate specific matching rules by requirements and exclusions based on the knowledge about characteristics and attributes from database.

The second question, "what kind of benefit?", is divided in two sections regarding the challenges (for production and human). Section 4 answers the questions about ergonomic benefits and influences. Given research from studies given an ergonomic improvement from round about 20% but as well an increased discomfort of 56%. This article presents exemplary the ergonomic results by applying five industrial state of the assessments cheats for exemplary workplace and exoskeleton as well. The ergonomic risk indicator is changed to an improved workplace situation, but under consideration of the validity. Section 5 answers the benefits and influences of exoskeletons for the production system. This paper asserts that time-related influences are the main relevant impacts. They are divided into three relevant pillars (setup times, task-execution impacts and process-related impacts). With intense study's by applying the REFA method the result is a wear/unwear time from 20.3 to 52.6 s.

The third question, "when integrate?", for the final challenge-e ffectiveness transformation, is answered in Section 6 in the form of a integration roadmap. This roadmap gives an overview and outlook of exoskeleton integration.

The exoskeleton has enormous potential to improve the daily life of workers by decreasing work-related health issues. However, in reality, there are some barriers based on legal issues [39], discomfort/acceptence, direct financial or productivity benefit and, therefore, missing long-term experience. This is the reason for increasing device development and research on this topic. As a result, we see some real-life examples for using exoskeletons in the automotive industry. After the community has enough long-time experience with impacts and processes, and the devices are more smart and comfortable, the next big step could be the usage of active (or semi-acitve) exoskeletons when the benefit is more obviously. A next big challenge is to create a realy noticable businesse case, either by transforming ergonomic benefit in payback costs or by a big improvement in the production system.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, C.D. and C.C.; Investigation, C.D.; Methodology, C.C.; Writing—original draft, C.D. and C.C.; Writing—review & editing, C.C. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research received no further external funding. Slight expenditure for research, business trips studies, hardware, etc. are supported from BMW as part of a project for predevelopment, in cooperation with Fraunhofer IAO. The APC of this Journal was funded by Fraunhofer IAO.

**Acknowledgments:** I would like to express my gratitude to my research supervisors. Thank you to Carmen Lucia Consantinescu for her guidance, enthusiastic encouragemen<sup>t</sup> and useful critiques of this research work. I would also like to thank to Claudiu-Alin Rusu, Stefan Giosan and Daniele Ippolito for their advice and assistance in developing the article and, overall, their attitude regarding the work done by our scientific team.

**Conflicts of Interest:** I declare no conflicts of interest.
