Employee-centric innovation: Integrating participatory design and video-analysis to foster the transition to Industry 5.0

Recently, the paradigm of Industry 5.0 has been introduced to complement that of Industry 4.0, which turned out to be technology- rather than human-oriented. Industry 5.0 is meant to foster a transition toward a human-centric industry, where the worker's well-being is prioritized. To meet this goal, it is crucial to directly involve employees from the earliest stages of design project. In the present work, we describe a case study that was meant to re-design the technology used in a validation laboratory. We adopted a mixed-method approach integrating employee's self-reported data and objective event-based data from in-the-field video-analysis. By doing this we could build a thorough understanding of the work activities and of the related main issues. We then devised a list of re-design recommendations that were translated in a revised application and in the suggested introduction of portable devices. The outcomes of a preliminary usability evaluation of the revised application were promising, indicating the effectiveness of the methodological approach.