Abstract

Identifying and mitigating ergonomic risks during the design phase of a workplace is essential for reducing worker exposure to the risk of developing a work-related musculoskeletal disorder in the construction manufacturing industry. However, acquiring the precise body motion data needed for ergonomic analysis of a future work scenario during design development without physical prototypes is a challenge. To overcome this limitation, this paper proposes an integrated virtual reality and 3D visualization approach capable of not only assessing ergonomic risks of an existing workplace design, but also proposing workplace design alternatives to reduce ergonomic risk levels in the workplace. The developed approach consists of five core components: initial data acquisition, 3D visualization of the preliminary workplace model, validation of the preliminary 3D workplace model, alternative workplace design, and alternative design evaluation. First, the initial data required to develop a 3D visualization of the preliminary workplace is obtained in research experiments employing virtual reality and a motion-capture system. Once the preliminary workplace model is validated, an alternative design is simulated using an interactive 3D visualization approach that enables prediction of revised worker motions based the proposed design alternative. Finally, the proposed design is evaluated based on the motion-capture data of a human subject collected in the virtual environment. To demonstrate this approach, a design alternative to an existing workstation task in which hardware is installed to window frames is explored as a case study. The results show that the proposed VR–3D visualization-based approach has the potential to effectively predict ergonomic risks in the workplace, minimizing the iterations with physical prototypes during the design process.