interaction systems

using real-time and persistent data collected from various wearable devices to achieve detailed information concerning physical and cognitive status of the industrial operator

Company: Consorzio Intellimech

Tutor: Daniele Regazzoni

Intellimech is a no-profit private research consortium promoting the collaboration of companies of different sizes and from various industrial domains.

One of the main issues of the Industry 5.0 paradigm concerns the central role of people in industrial contexts. Indeed, Industry 5.0 envisaged a business model characterized by the cooperation between machines and human beings.

Such a model requires rethinking and innovating the information management systems and tools, often inadequate to the complexity of the current socio-technological environments.

The ongoing technological changes are accompanied by the need to define digital innovation paths that are socially sustainable, putting technology at the service of humans positioned at the center of the entire production process.

Different Intellimech partners are interested to deep explore these fields:

• technologies for the personalization of work environments by including in the model the specific physical and cognitive abilities and skills of the workers, taking account of their roles, duties and needs;

• methodologies and technologies for managing human-machine interaction by promoting a flexible and adaptable solution for the development of numerous industrial applications, from new intelligent and adaptive interfaces, to human-robot collaboration;

• methodologies and technologies for optimizing the cognitive load.

Thanks to the recent advancements, the adoption of wearables sensors has spread in the industrial context to investigate workers’ conditions and well-being.

The cumulative effect of positive impacts on the human factors brings economic benefit through productivity increase, waste reduction and decrease of absenteeism.

In this view, recently, some research activities have been focused on workers’ physiological data to infer the insurgence of phenomena such as fatigue and mental stress, which may have a relevant impact on process performance.

Another research line adopted eye trackers coupled with wearables and cameras to estimate workers’ attention and stress levels.

Despite recent developments and efforts in the field, the known solutions still lack a global approach able to create a match between the parameters from sensors and the specific characteristics of operators.

The project aims at facing the industrial interests of Intellimech partners exploring the relation between the parameters collected with the sensors and the physical /cognitive condition of workers.