I have a bit of trouble performing some tasks that a smaller person could easily do, because when I was weight lifting, I had a few incidents where I pushed or pulled on something as hard as I remembered and ended up breaking it. I trained myself never to push as hard as I absolutely can, because if it takes that much pressure I'm probably doing it wrong.

I don't follow cycling as much as I used to, but in an attempt to keep rich teams from building bicycles out of unobtanium, they put some minimum weight restrictions on the bikes. One of the early results was that some telemetry gear started getting built into these bikes. The biggest one I know of was building a torque meter into the rear wheel. For the cost of a fraction of a percent of power output, it could tell the coach if you're really going all out or dogging it. The difference in those numbers would hint at you being sick, a subtle equipment failure, or an aerodynamics problem.

It should take a certain range of force to open a door, drill a hole, tighten a bolt, or raise a platform. If you are using more than that, something is jammed, your bit is wearing faster than expected, the bolt is cross threaded, or something is stuck on the platform and you're trying to ram it through the roof.

Some tools are very difficult to scale up to high torque situations, but it seems like this data should be available to a robot, via sensors on the power supplies if nothing else.