Industry 5.0 - Human-centered work process design through the psychological measurement of stress, thanks to new wearables

The effects of demographic change are having a clear impact on German companies. There is a growing shortage of workers to perform manual processes, particularly in production companies, which is leading to a long-term decrease in company productivity and an increase in stress levels among employees. In addition, the rising level of customer-specific product diversification intensifies the stress situation for employees due to the greater and faster adaptation to new product configurations, which foster psychological stressors. While the consideration of the physiological stress situation is state of the art and work design uses these results to design workplaces, there is a lack of easy-to-use devices for measuring the psychological stress situation of employees in order to meet the individual needs for recovery. This paper describes an approach that uses a new wearable to determine the mental stress situation of employees by analyzing psycho-physiological parameters and deriving the need for recovery. The connection between the psycho-physiological parameters and the human performance potential is presented and the functionality of the wearable is explained. In addition, the approach is being tested in a laboratory study with six test subjects in a production-like environment. The initial results show a high potential to sustainably improve workforce scheduling.