Systematic Review of Smart Walker Technologies: Hardware Design, Control Architectures, Sensing Modalities, and Clinical Applications (2016–2026)

Smart walkers extend conventional walking aids by integrating sensing, computation, feedback, braking, or powered actuation to support mobility, navigation, safety, gait assessment, and rehabilitation. This systematic review synthesizes smart-walker research published between January 2016 and August 2026, with emphasis on mechanical architecture, sensing, human–robot interaction, navigation, clinical validation, and translation to practice. A structured search across IEEE Xplore, PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials yielded 854 records. After duplicate removal, screening, and full-text eligibility assessment, 104 publications were retained. To avoid double counting, the corpus was separated into 97 primary studies and seven non-primary sources comprising six reviews and one study protocol. Quantitative synthesis was restricted to the 97 primary studies and was obtained from the study-level coding table. Within this coded corpus, 71 studies (73.2%) investigated active or hybrid systems and 26 studies (26.8%) investigated passive systems. Force/pressure sensing was the most frequently coded modality (46 studies, 47.4%), followed by inertial sensing (29 studies, 29.9%), vision (27 studies, 27.8%), LiDAR (25 studies, 25.8%), and ultrasonic/infrared ranging (7 studies, 7.2%); modalities were non-mutually exclusive. Validation remained heterogeneous: 37 studies (38.1%) involved no human participants, 30 studies (30.9%) used healthy/asymptomatic participants only, 24 studies (24.7%) evaluated target clinical or end-user populations, and 6 studies (6.2%) used mixed or stakeholder cohorts. The review shows substantial progress in shared control, admittance-based interaction, environmental perception, and multimodal assistance, but also identifies persistent limitations in clinical evidence, standardized evaluation, long-term deployment, and regulatory alignment. Future work should prioritize reproducible study-level reporting, patient-centered trials, robust low-cost sensing and force estimation, fail-safe shared control, and validation in realistic home and community environments.