An Open Access Dataset of Tweets related to Exoskeletons and 100 Research Questions

The exoskeleton technology has been rapidly advancing in the recent past due to its multitude of applications in assisted living, military, healthcare, firefighting, and industries. With the projected increase in the diverse uses of exoskeletons in the next few years in these application domains and beyond, it is crucial to study, interpret, and analyze user perspectives, public opinion, reviews, and feedback related to exoskeletons, for which a comprehensive dataset is necessary. The Internet of Everything (IOE) era of today's living, characterized by people spending more time on the Internet than ever before, holds the potential for developing such a dataset by the mining of relevant web behavior data from social media communications, which have increased exponentially in the last few years. Twitter, one such social media platform, is highly popular amongst all age groups, who communicate on diverse topics including but not limited to news, current events, politics, emerging technologies, family, relationships, and career opportunities, via tweets, while sharing their views, opinions, perspectives, and feedback towards the same. To address this research challenge by utilizing the potential of the IOE style of living, this paper makes multiple scientific contributions to this field. First, it presents a novel approach of mining tweets that is not bound by any restrictions on the number of days during which the tweets can be mined. Second, by application of this approach, it presents an open-access dataset of approximately 20,000 tweets related to exoskeletons, that were posted over a period of 231 days. Finally, based on an exploratory review of 108 emerging works in this field and its interrelated disciplines, the paper discusses multiple interdisciplinary applications of this dataset and presents 100 research questions for researchers to study, analyze, evaluate, and investigate.