Design Guidelines for Combining Digital Human Modeling and Virtual Reality to Foresee Workplaces Ergonomics Issues During Product Development

A product development process establishes requirements not just for the new product’s quality and performance, but also for its manufacturing process, to guarantee that the item is manufactured with minimal impact. This is because, if an issue is discovered after the product has been released, the implications go beyond the expensive cost of the repair; the physical ergonomics problem can affect the worker’s comfort, productivity, and product quality. Virtual reality and digital human modeling are often employed in Industry 4.0 to evaluate ergonomics, but they are rarely used to examine physical ergonomics throughout the product development phases. Our study presents design guidelines to combine virtual reality and digital human modeling to anticipate the physical ergonomics evaluations of the assembly process while the product is still in development. Based on physical observations of body-posture angles and total effort classification, our proof of concept performed comparably to conventional methods. We also observed comparable results when we analyzed attributive factors such as hand clearance and strength. In contrast, our proof of concept has been shown to be limited for occupations involving extra ergonomic physical risk factors, such as touch perception, temperature fluctuations, or size changes.