A multimodal virtual reality set-up for human-centered design of industrial workstations

Abstract

Although the so-called Industry 4.0 trend is promoting 
the increasing automation of processes in the factories 
of the future, manual activities still play an extremely 
important role within the factory and human factors greatly 
affect the process performance. However, the analysis of 
human-machine interaction and the prediction of human 
performance in industry are difficult but crucial to have an 
optimized design of workspaces and interfaces, reducing 
time and cost of implementation, and avoiding late design 
changes. This research adopts a multimodal human-centered 
approach for the analysis of human-machine interaction, 
and proposes a multimodal experimental set-up for the 
evaluation of the workers’ experience to support the design of 
industrial workstations. The set-up combines virtual mockups, interaction with both physical and virtual objects, and 
monitoring sensors to track users and analyze their actions 
and reactions. It allows creating a multimodal environment 
able to deepen the interaction between humans and systems 
or interfaces, to support design activities. Indeed, it has been 
demonstrated that the analysis of the reactions of the users 
involved, allows to evaluate the quality of the interaction, 
identify the critical issues, define corrective actions, and 
propose guidelines for system design or redesign [1]. The 
paper describes the application of the proposed set-up on two 
industrial case studies and reports the main results