  Most current hand exoskeletons have been designed specifically for
rehabilitation, assistive or haptic applications to simplify the design
requirements. Clinical studies on post-stroke rehabilitation have shown that
adapting assistive or haptic applications into physical therapy sessions
significantly improves the motor learning and treatment process. The recent
technology can lead to the creation of generic hand exoskeletons that are
application-agnostic. In this paper, our motivation is to create guidelines and
best practices for generic exoskeletons by reviewing the literature of current
devices. First, we describe each application and briefly explain their design
requirements, and then list the design selections to achieve these
requirements. Then, we detail each selection by investigating the existing
exoskeletons based on their design choices, and by highlighting their impact on
application types. With the motivation of creating efficient generic
exoskeletons in the future, we finally summarize the best practices in the
literature.
