ErgoAssist: An assistance system to maintain ergonomic guidelines at workplaces

We propose an assistance system which observes a process involving humans and automatically takes measures in situations where ergonomic guidelines are violated. The system uses a Microsoft Kinect Sensor to capture a depth map of the scene. Using this sensory information, the system extracts working pose and assesses ergonomics in the current situation. If an ergonomically critical situation occurs, the system flexibly adjusts the height of a workpiece during a process in order to enable the worker to adapt a more comfortable pose. First experiments show the potential of the method but also reveal the remaining technological challenge in capturing the pose. As future work, we plan to extend our existing pose capturing method for the 3D case. Moreover, we plan to conduct studies in order to analyse the acceptance of such a system in production environment.