Using Virtual Reality and Smart Textiles to Assess the Design of Workstations

Abstract

This paper presents a solution that integrates a smart textiles system with virtual reality to assess the design of workstations from an ergonomics point of view. By using the system, ergonomists, designers, engineers, and operators, can test design proposals of workstations in an immersive virtual environment while they see their ergonomics evaluation results displayed in real-time. The system allows its users to evaluate the ergonomics of the workplace in a pre-production phase. The workstation design can be modified, enabling workstation designers to better understand, test and evaluate how to create successful workstation designs, eventually to be used by the operators in production. This approach uses motion capture together with virtual reality and is aimed to complement and integrate with the use of digital human modelling (DHM) software at virtual stages of the production development process.

Wearable Motion Capture Devices for the Prevention of Work-Related Musculoskeletal Disorders in Ergonomics—An Overview of Current Applications, Challenges, and Future Opportunities

“…One such example is the vision-based system evaluated by Vignais et al [87], in which the worker is represented as a manikin, and where adverse exposures are visualized as colored body parts of the manikin to indicate the severity of the hazardous exposure of each gross body segment. Virtual reality, on the other hand, typically provides an immersive virtual environment with real-time interactive graphics [295] and has multiple applications linked to the prevention of MSDs, including training of tasks (simulations), evaluating design choices of layout or components, and designing work tasks that can be performed to reduce adverse biomechanical exposures [298,299]. The use of wearable motion captures, such as IMUs, allows for the presentation of the user's postures and movements in the virtual movements [298,300] and can also be integrated with some of the observational risk assessments presented in Section 3.2.2.…”

Digital Ergonomics—The Reliability of the Human Factor and Its Impact on the Maintenance of Aircraft Brakes and Wheels

“…In a virtual manufacturing model, early detection of ergonomic problems reduces the time and cost of finding solutions [17], protects workers from unnecessary risk of harm, and improves workplace well-being [18,19].…”