The Virtual Reality in Olive Oil Industry Occupational Health and Safety: An Integrative Review

The impact of Virtual Reality (VR) on methods and techniques of Occupational Health and Safety is widely considered when high-tech, automatized and human risk-intensive branch involved. VR technologies albeit considered mature, require the expanding from the scientific and merely experimental visualization realm into more multidisciplinary areas especially the OHS in companies. As VR has a significant impact on improvement of occupational health and safety situation at any enterprise, it is to be adopted or absorbed by the so called traditional industries, especially agri-food ones. The VR can provide the simulation and prediction of contingency conditions not included within the risk management approach of the company and to serve for operationalizing and designing future and retrospective analysis of potential or befallen risks and human errors. This paper reviews a sample of conceptual and empirical articles in order to describe and synthesize possible approach to enhance VR use within OHS in Olive Oil industry. The main objective of the integrative study is to build new framework of the VR application in technology-based innovation within the industry. This paper will discuss the issues related to state-of-art of interactive virtual environments, especially Virtual Reality, in processes of Occupational Health and Safety in traditional agri-food industry such as Olive Oil multi-sector (olive farming, oil press, olive pickles). © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

Time to reconfigure balancing behaviour in man:changing visual condition while riding a continuously moving platform

While balancing on a continuously anteroposterior (A-P) translating platform (10 cm, 0.5 Hz), the head normally oscillates with the platform without vision but is stabilized in space with vision. We estimated the time to shift from one to the other balancing behaviour when visual condition changed at some stage during the balancing trials. Ten subjects performed randomly 50 balancing trials (each lasting 18 s): 10 trials with eyes open (EO), 10 with eyes closed (EC), 15 in which participants started with EO and closed their eyes (condition EO!EC) in response to an acoustic signal delivered during the trial, and 15 starting with EC and closing their eyes (EC!EO) in response to the same signal. No other speciWc instruction was given. Displacements of malleolus, hip and head, and EMG from leg and axial muscles were recorded. Indexes of amplitude of A-P head and hip oscillation and of amplitude of EMG activity were computed. All variables were larger with EC than EO. On changing visual condition during the trial, the pattern of head and hip movement and of muscle activity turned into that appropriate for the new visual condition in a time-interval ranging from about 1 to 2.5 s. For each subject, the mean latency of the change in the balancing behaviour was assessed by statistical methods. On average, the latencies of kinematics and EMG changes proved to be longer for the EO!EC condition than viceversa. Further, the latencies of the changes were also measured across all EO!EC and EC!EO individual trials. These values were clustered around particular epochs of the Wrst few oscillation cycles following the shift in visual condition. The results show that subjects can rapidly adapt their balancing behaviour to the new visual condition. However, they appear to refrain from releasing the new behaviour were this unWt, and unfastened it at appropriate time in the next platform translation cycle. These Wndings reveal the temporal and spatial features of the automatic release of the new balancing strategy in response to a shift in the ongoing sensory set, and emphasize the swiftness in the change in balancing behaviour when subjects pass from a non-visual to a visual reference frame