Online Human Activity Recognition for Ergonomics Assessment

International audienceWe address the problem of recognizing the current activity performed by a human worker, providing an information useful for automatic ergonomic evaluation of workstations for industrial applications.Traditional ergonomic assessment methods rely on pen-and-paper worksheet, such as the Er-gonomic Assessment Worksheet (EAWS). Nowadays, there exists no tool to automatically estimate the ergonomics score from sensors (external cameras or wearable sensors). As the ergonomic evaluation depends of the activity that is being performed, the first step towards a fully automatic ergonomic assessment is to automatically identify the different activities within an industrial task. To address this problem, we propose a method based on wearable sensors and supervised learning based on Hidden Markov Model (HMM). The activity recognition module works in two steps. First, the parameters of the model are learned offline from observation based on both sensors, then in a second stage, the model can be used to recognize the activity offline and online. We apply our method to recognize the current activity of a worker during a series of tasks typical of the manufacturing industry. We recorded 6 participants performing a sequence of tasks using wearable sensors.Two systems were used: the MVN Link suit from Xsens and the e-glove from Emphasis Telematics (See Fig. 1). The first consists of 17 wireless inertial sensors embedded in a lycra suit, and is used to track the whole-body motion. The second is a glove that includes pressure sensors on fingertips, and finger flexion sensors. The motion capture data are combined with the one from the glove and fed to our activity recognition model. The tasks were designed to involve elements of EAWS such as load handling, screwing and manipulating objects while in different static postures. The data are labeled following the EAWS categories such as " standing bent forward " , " overhead work " or " kneeling ". In terms of performances, the model is able to recognize the activities related to EAWS with 91% of precision by using a small subset of features such as the vertical position of the center of mass, the velocity of the center of mass and the angle of the L5S1 joint

Activity Recognition for Ergonomics Assessment of Industrial Tasks with Automatic Feature Selection

International audienceIn industry, ergonomic assessment is currently performed manually based on the identification of postures and actions by experts. We aim at proposing a system for automatic ergonomic assessment based on activity recognition. In this paper, we define a taxonomy of activities, composed of four levels, compatible with items evaluated in standard ergonomic worksheets. The proposed taxonomy is applied to learn activity recognition models based on Hidden Markov Models. We also identify dedicated sets of features to be used as input of the recognition models so as to maximize the recognition performance for each level of our taxonomy. We compare three feature selection methods to obtain these subsets. Data from 13 participants performing a series of tasks mimicking industrial tasks are collected to train and test the recognition module. Results show that the selected subsets allow us to successfully infer ergonomically relevant postures and actions

Online Human Activity Recognition for Ergonomics Assessment

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Ethical and Social Considerations for the Introduction of Human-Centered Technologies at Work

International audienceHuman-centered technologies such as collaborative robots, exoskeletons, and wearable sensors are rapidly spreading in industry and manufacturing because of their intrinsic potential at assisting workers and improving their working conditions. The deployment of these technologies, albeit inevitable, poses several ethical and societal issues. Guidelines for ethically aligned design of autonomous andintelligent systems do exist, however we argue that ethical recommendations must necessarily be complemented by ananalysis of the social impact of these technologies. In this paper, we report on our preliminary studies on the opinion of factoryworkers and of people outside this environment on human-centered technologies at work. In light of these studies, we discuss ethical and social considerations for deploying these technologies in a way that improves acceptance

Towards collaboration between professional caregivers and robots - A preliminary study

International audienceIn this paper, we address the question of which potential use of a robot in a health-care environment is imagined by people that are not experts in robotics, and how these people imagine to teach new movements to a robot. We report on the preliminary results of our investigation , in which we conducted 40 interviews with non-experts in robotics and a focus group with professional caregivers

Activity Recognition With Multiple Wearable Sensors for Industrial Applications

International audienceIn this paper, we address the problem of recognizing the current activity performed by a human operator, providing an information useful for automatic ergonomic evaluation for industrial applications. While the majority of research in activity recognition relies on cameras observing the human, here we explore the use of wearable sensors, which are more suitable in industrial environments. We use a wearable motion tracking suit and a sensorized glove. We describe our approach for activity recognition with a probabilistic model based on Hidden Markov Models, applied to the problem of recognizing elementary activities during a pick-and-place task inspired by a manufacturing scenario. We show that our model is able to correctly recognize the activities with 96% of precision if both sensors are used

One-shot Evaluation of the Control Interface of a Robotic Arm by Non-Experts

International audienceIn this paper we study the relation between the performance of use and user preferences for a robotic arm control interface. We are interested in the user preference of non-experts after a one-shot evaluation of the interfaces on a test task. We also probe into the possible relation between user performance and individual factors. After a focus group study, we choose to compare the robotic arm joystick and a graphical user interface. Then, we studied the user performance and subjective evaluation of the interfaces during an experiment with the robot arm Jaco and N=23 healthy adults. Our preliminary results show that the user preference for a particular interface does not seem to depend on their performance in using it: for example, many users expressed their preference for the joystick while they were better performing with the graphical interface. Contrary to our expectations, this result does not seem to relate to the user's individual factors that we evaluated, namely desire for control and negative attitude towards robots

Human Movement and Ergonomics: an Industry-Oriented Dataset for Collaborative Robotics

International audienceImproving work conditions in industry is a major challenge that can be addressed with new emerging technologies such as collaborative robots. Machine learning techniques can improve the performance of those robots, by endowing them with a degree of awareness of the human state and ergonomics condition. The availability of appropriate datasets to learn models and test prediction and control algorithms however remains an issue. This paper presents a dataset of human motions in industry-like activities, fully labeled according to the ergonomics assessment worksheet EAWS, widely used in industries such as car manufacturing. Thirteen participants performed several series of activities, such as screwing and manipulating loads in different conditions, resulting in more than 5 hours of data. The dataset contains the participants' whole-body kinematics recorded both with wearable inertial sensors and marker-based optical motion capture, finger pressure force, video recordings, and annotations by 3 independent annotators of the performed action and the adopted posture following the EAWS postural grid. Sensor data are available in different formats to facilitate their reuse. The dataset is intended for use by researchers developing algorithms for classifying, predicting or evaluating human motion in industrial settings, as well as researchers developing collaborative robotics solutions that aim at improving the workers' ergonomics. The annotation of the whole dataset following an ergonomics standard makes it valuable for ergonomics-related applications, but we expect its use to be broader in the robotics, machine learning and human movement communities

Ethical and Social Considerations for the Introduction of Human-Centered Technologies at Work

International audienceHuman-centered technologies such as collaborative robots, exoskeletons, and wearable sensors are rapidly spreading in industry and manufacturing because of their intrinsic potential at assisting workers and improving their working conditions. The deployment of these technologies, albeit inevitable, poses several ethical and societal issues. Guidelines for ethically aligned design of autonomous andintelligent systems do exist, however we argue that ethical recommendations must necessarily be complemented by ananalysis of the social impact of these technologies. In this paper, we report on our preliminary studies on the opinion of factoryworkers and of people outside this environment on human-centered technologies at work. In light of these studies, we discuss ethical and social considerations for deploying these technologies in a way that improves acceptance