A protocol to assess manufacturing ergonomics on immersive virtual environments

Manufacturing Ergonomics refers to the application of ergonomic principles to manufacturing tasks in order to optimize workers’ actions and prevent musculoskeletal disorder (MSD), which has been demonstrated to have a great economic impact on both companies and societies. Traditional approaches are based on the observation of individual workers performing their jobs, the detection of unnatural postures (e.g. bending, twisting, overextending, rotating), and the definition of corrective actions according to ergonomic guidelines. Virtual prototypes and Digital Human Models (DHMs) are recently used to simulate ergonomic performance on virtual manikins operating in digital workplaces and optimize the workstation design before creation. However, actual tools do not allow the evaluation of both physical and cognitive ergonomics, do not include the subjective impressions of workers, and do not consider the workers’ needs and capabilities. The present paper defines a protocol analysis to investigate both functional and cognitive ergonomic performance of workers within an immersive virtual environment, where both aspects of ergonomics are assessed to properly evaluate the quality of human work. An industrial case study is presented, where the protocol is adopted to optimize the design of a workstation for manual operations on pipes for energy industry.