PhysDox: Benchmarking LLMs on Physical Feasibility Auditing of Physiological Sensing Protocols

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly assist in experimental design, yet fluent protocols often remain physically infeasible. We introduce PhysDox, a physical feasibility auditing benchmark for biomedical protocols comprising a 683-sample expert-curated Gold set and a 5,000-sample Silver set across six sensing domains. We formulate the task as a two-stage evaluation: severity detection classifying protocols as valid, minor, or fatal, followed by the constraint-level diagnosis of fatal violations. Evaluating 6 LLMs across 4 inference strategies yields a peak Stage-1 macro-F1 of only 53.0. Moreover, strong oracle diagnosis collapses during end-to-end evaluation due to correlated cascade errors. Error analysis reveals scaffold bias, where models conflate procedural completeness with physical validity. Consequently, implicit constraints exhibit a 2 times higher miss rate than explicit hardware violations, supported by strong statistical correlation at ρ=0.81 and p<0.01. Trace analysis of false negatives exposes a 54%--46% split between attention and judgment failures, ultimately demonstrating that protocol auditing demands calibrated feasibility reasoning rather than factual recall or longer rationales.