Real-time full body ergonomic platform for ergonomics assessment and fast worker training in industrial systems

The authors present a new multipurpose platform to evaluate in real-time workers’ postures computing relevant ergonomic indexes while supporting fast postural training of operators by providing adequate feedbacks. Musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) nowadays still represents the strongest workforce’s health-related issue in industrial context. Workstation and production system design needs to include ergonomics evaluations during the initial stages of the design by considering productivity goals and workers’ well-being conditions at the same time. This becomes even more urgent if we consider that workforce average age of retirement has increased with time in developed or rapidly developing countries. In this international context, the new SARS Covid-19 emergency has arisen in the last year with a large impact on many of the industrial sectors. In several cases, companies have experienced an increment in the workforce turnover with a consequent need for fast training activities (also in virtual environments) to speed up the learning curve of the workers. Under time pressure situations, posture training activity is often neglected with the final risk for the workers to repeat wrong movements during the work shift. In the last decade, thanks to digital and technological developments, new ergonomic assessment tools have been proposed. However, the majority of them concentrate their attention on upper limbs instead of making a full body assessment. Furthermore, only few of them provide the real-time evaluation of some ergonomics parameters and, generally, they are limited to just one ergonomic index. Finally, some attempts have been made to integrate the postural evaluation with worker training by providing audio, video or haptic feedbacks to the worker. Further valuable characteristics of the proposed platform are: the set of ergonomic indicators selected in accordance with international standards, the intuitive graphical user interface promoting workers posture awareness and self-management, and the community availability and usability, ensured by its open-source release. Starting from the current state of the art and the available tools we propose a digital platform aiming to provide real-time feedbacks to workers according to their posture during training and task execution sessions. Moreover, RULA, REBA and OWAS indexes are automatically computed. The developed open source software can also detect operators’ awkward postures during work activities to avoid MSDs possible consequences. An inertial motion capture (mocap) suit is used with no space limitation, no occlusion constraints, no needs of further materials (e.g. wires, cameras, markers) and the system can be used in every kind of workspace and industrial settings. A new open source software has been developed and integrated with the inertial suit to automatically evaluate workers’ posture in real time and to compute different ergonomic indexes. A comparative analysis with optical cameras has been progressed to validate the accuracy of inertial sensors adopted for this analysis. A full and complete analysis of the behavior of the limbs of the whole body guarantees the possibility to speed up training sessions and to provide new workforce turnover with correct posture consciousness to avoid MSDs. Therefore, operators can gain awareness and act properly, according to the feedbacks. Finally, it can be helpful for all manufacturing and logistics sectors that suffer the shortage of trained workforce to face the demand in the short-term period. Workers’ posture and ergonomic indexes are automatically computed and displayed by the software dynamically and on site. Workers can directly adjust their posture according to the received instantaneous feedback and they can understand which part of the body is majorly stressed and which movements need to be modified. At the same time, ergonomic experts can evaluate benefits assessed by a workplace changes and industrial engineers can work towards a re-design of the production process and layout. These results will increase workforce consciousness both in training session and during daily work, decreasing the possibility to get into MSDs. A new multipurpose software-based platform able to generate automatically and on-time different ergonomic outlines is proposed. The cost of this technology, which is one of its actual limitation, is continuous decreasing together with weight and dimensions of the hardware needed to capture workers’ activities (Ranavolo et al., 2018). This research contributes to extend the existent literature concerning the possibility to make ergonomic assessments in real-time, with a higher number of indexes provided at the same time to ergonomists, industrial engineers and operators, for a wider and deeper awareness of working postures. Future steps will incorporate real-time measures of heart rate and the VO2 max in order to evaluate the physical fatigue, leading to a more global and in-depth vision of worker’s health status. The proposed platform has been conceived as a transversal tool able to adapt its behavior to various application sectors. Specific test cases will be defined in further researches to highlight the reliability of the adopted technology in peculiar scenarios. Technological advancement constantly provides to researchers the opportunity to improve the results in their research fields with smarter, faster, smaller and even cheaper technologies. Inertial mocap is one of the most promising perspective to bet on in future ergonomics posture evaluation research. At the same time, information needs to be meaningful and valuable for everyone, not only for designers or specialists. Feedbacks need to be clear, easy to understand, provided in real-time to give the opportunity to adjust bad habits or even to forecast them, but mainly, feedbacks need to be on site, allowing workforce self-training and continuous improvement.