Cyber-physical System for Security and Wellbeing of Shop Floor Workers

Although factories are increasingly automated nowadays, operations still require human intervention due to complex operations for a machine to operate or the investment not being economically viable. Many human-operated activities require a lot of physical effort, unnatural positions, and physical demands. In addition to repetitive work, bad positions or physical effort can cause long-term problems for operators. There are different ways to help operators, for example, through breaks or relaxation exercises, which help avoid or mitigate some of these health problems in the long term. This work presents use cases in the DIH4CPS project that established a solution for collecting data from workers and advising workers and the company’s human resources on the best strategies to keep workers safe and fit at work and home. Two different use cases were defined to achieve these objectives, and two different solutions were developed. Having been validated in three different factories to monitor workstations with different characteristics, aiming to improve solutions and check how they react in different environments. This paper presents the problem and the results obtained from validation performed in the different factories.