Video analysis for ergonomics assessment in the manufacturing industry: initial feedback on a case study

The manufacturing industry is being benefited from the new technologies developed in the field of artificial intelligence. However, as part of the European AI strategy, the role of workers in the industry must be protected by including human-centered ethical values. The TEAMING.AI project is developing a revolutionary human-AI teaming software platform comprised of interconnected utilities. This work reflects the preliminary results of some of the methodologies that are being developed within the project. An ergonomics assessment of manual activities performed by operators in a manufacturing workplace is carried out. The data for the assessment comes from video recordings obtained with cameras installed in strategic points of the shop floor. In this work, the assessment is done by manually selecting the images from the videos and scoring them based on the Rapid Upper-Limb Assessment and Rapid Entire Body Assessment methods. Once a scored is computed, an analysis of the activity is provided. The preliminary results show that distortion in the image from recording can affect the assessments. A method to enhance the video analysis in two major directions is proposed. The first direction focuses in the automatic operator detection. The second, on generating 3D information for ergonomic assessment with undistorted images. Some details related to the use case are omitted to preserve the anonymity of the operators in the company.