A Preliminary Experimental Study on the Workers’ Workload Assessment to Design Industrial Products and Processes

Abstract

The human-centered design (HCD) approach places humans at the center of design in order to improve both products and processes, and to give users an effective, efficient and satisfying interactive experience. In industrial design and engineering, HCD is very useful in helping to achieve the novel Industry 5.0 concept, based on improving workers’ wellbeing by providing prosperity beyond jobs and growth, while respecting the production limits of the planet as recently promoted by the European Commission. In this context, the paper proposes an ergonomic assessment method based on the analysis of the workers’ workload to support the design of industrial products and processes. This allows the simultaneous analysis of the physical and cognitive workload of operators while performing their tasks during their shift. The method uses a minimum set of non-invasive wearable devices to monitor human activity and physiological parameters, in addition to questionnaires for subjective self-assessment. The method has been preliminarily tested on a real industrial case in order to demonstrate how it can help companies to support the design of optimized products and processes promoting the workers’ wellbeing.

A comprehensive UX index to evaluate industrial tasks from a human-centered perspective

“…The purpose of the following paragraph is to present the proposed approach to evaluate, in an effective and reliable way, the ergonomic aspects related to the activities of interest. A revised version of the methodology presented by the same research group in [4] for the UX assessment has been here defined (Fig. 1) .…”

“…Compared to [4], the current algorithm redefines each of the UX components by avoiding the baseline reference and it does not consider the time that the operator needs to accomplish the task due to the lack of any reference time: in future revisions, this parameter will be kept as one of the variables defining the level of user task's experience. In addition, seeing that the task is performed in a virtual scenario, there could have been a mismatch in the execution time compared to the real working context.…”

“…Thus, the current study contributes to the definition and the implementation of the Human in The Loop (HIL) concept in the modern industrial scenario, which is seeking for sustainable, resource-efficient, and flexible production models, enhancing interactions between people, machines, and products. To this end and compared to previous similar proposals by the authors [4], the following research work proposes an improved tool suited for the industrial context and aimed at analysing the operator UX in carrying out any sort of industrial tasks. The paper presents a comprehensive and renovated ergonomic index, differentiating between postural workload, cognitive workload and stress, and the relative technological setup to investigate the operator's experience and to support the design of industrial products and processes.…”

“…In [9], a human-centred mixed-reality simulation environment has been provided to optimize postural ergonomics in the workstation design. Brunzini et al proposed a minimum set of non-invasive wearable devices to monitor human activity and physiological parameters, in addition to subjective self-assessment questionnaires [4]. Several issues arouse when considering human tracking device, from occlusion phenomena up to the environmental lightening conditions: therefore, it is fundamental to understand the context of use and how the testing environment could impact on the data collection.…”

Industry 5.0 Beyond Technology: An Analysis Through the Lens of Business and Operations Management Literature

“…The theme Human Resources (HR) and Workers in I5.0 encompasses most of the papers in this SLR (Brunzini et al, 2021;Esthela et al, 2021;Ojstersek et al, 2021;Orlova, 2021). They focus mainly on human-robot collaboration and its potential to improve safety, ergonomics, and productivity.…”