Extended reality as assistive technology for the inclusion of vulnerable workers in industry: the XR capability support framework

The increasing difficulty in recruiting qualified personnel, combined with growing workforce heterogeneity, has intensified the need for inclusive and human-centric technological solutions in occupational settings. Extended Reality (XR) is increasingly considered a promising assistive technology to support workers facing structural, cognitive, or skill-related barriers. This systematic literature review adopts a capability-oriented perspective to investigate how XR supports vulnerable workers in educational and industrial contexts. Using a structured taxonomy of human abilities, the study maps XR applications to specific capability domains and vulnerable worker categories. The findings show a concentration of evidence on unexperienced and low-skilled workers and on performance-related capabilities, while other groups and capabilities remain underexplored. By explicitly linking vulnerable user characteristics to capability enhancement, this review provides a structured user-capability matrix that supports more inclusive, human-centred, and evidence-based design of XR applications in occupational settings.