A Personalized Dynamic Balance Evaluation Paradigm for Hip Exoskeleton-Assisted Walking under Unexpected Ground Perturbations

Hip exoskeletons may improve recovery from unexpected gait perturbations, yet personalizing assistance remains difficult because balance is multidimensional and human-in-the-loop experiments are small-sample and noisy. We present a participant-specific composite balance cost that integrates seven biomechanical sub-metrics spanning margin of stability, center-of-mass dynamics, and whole-body angular momentum. The sub-metrics are converted to direction-aligned, dimensionless cost features, and nonnegative fusion weights are learned on the simplex. Coupled with an empirical-Bayes hierarchical model, the learned-composite selector estimates each tested condition's posterior probability of being best, P(best), and a high-probability candidate set with size $K_{0.8}$. The framework was evaluated with three participants walking at 1.1 m/s during unilateral belt-slip perturbations across 46 hip-assistance conditions. In the full-budget analysis (B = 4 repeats per condition), the selector concentrated 80% of the posterior probability within 1 to 5 of 46 conditions, compared with 2 to 12 for equal-weight fusion and 4 to 37 for principal component analysis fusion. This smaller candidate set could shorten personalization experiments and limit participants' exposure to repeated perturbations in future studies. Selected-condition trials showed lower observed composite costs than no-torque trials, with nominal p < 0.05 for P2 and P3. Leave-one-repeat-out refits yielded positive mean held-out rank correlations for all participants and moderate stability of the learned weights and candidate sets. These proof-of-concept results support participant-specific composite balance evaluation for candidate selection in perturbation-based human-in-the-loop experiments.