Powered exoskeletons for humans have long triggered the imagination. Merely two decades ago a role was envisaged for these devices in the assistance and rehabilitation of the impaired, and the number of powered exoskeletons for the upper and lower limbs has steadily grown ever since. Gait rehabilitation exoskeletons in particular were introduced to assist in the intensive and repetitive gait training of persons with gait impairment due to spinal cord injury, stroke and other neurological disorders. In this way physiotherapists could be relieved from the strenuous effort involved in gait assistance and patients could benefit from intensive and quantifiable assistive training.

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The clinical promise of deep brain stimulation (DBS) for neuropsychiatric conditions is coupled with the potential for ethical conflicts of interest because the work is so heavily reliant upon collaborations between academia, industry and the clinic. To foster transparency and public trust, we offer ethical guidance for the management of conflicts of interest in the conduct of DBS research and practice so that this nascent field can better balance competing goods and en-gineer new and better strategies for the amelioration of human suffering. We also hope that our ethical analysis will be of relevance to those working with other related neuroprosthetic devices, such brain- omputer interfaces and neural arrays, which naturally share many of the same concerns.

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