Abstract

Real-time assessment of the ergonomic risks to which workers are exposed at a workstation and the provision of real-time corrective feedback intervention to workers play an essential role in improving safety in the workplace through the reduction of long-term exposure of workers to the ergonomically hazardous postures associated with physical fatigue and work-related musculoskeletal disorders. This study proposes a framework, “VR-RET”, that integrates virtual reality and an inertia motion capture system to rapidly assess postures, providing the following inputs in real time: (1) full-body postural ergonomic risk assessment that deploys existing rule-based methods such as Rapid Upper Limb Assessment and Rapid Entire Body Assessment, (2) auditory feedback, triggered when the exposure to ergonomic risks is higher than a pre-defined threshold, and (3) visual feedback intervention to correct ergonomically hazardous postures through the provision of recommendations during training on industrialized construction tasks. The proposed framework is verified through a pre-test/post-test procedure in conjunction with a randomized control group experiment involving 37 subjects. Based on the comparison of the pre-test and post-test data, a reduction of 35% in the percentage of time spent being subjected to ergonomic risks in the high-risk range is observed when training is administered using VR-RET and RULA is deployed as the risk assessment method; in contrast, a significant reduction is not observed when Rapid Entire Body Assessment is used. This study’s contributions are twofold: (1) a framework for providing ergonomic and operational training through VR simulation based on real-time acquisition and processing of body motion data (with the objective of mitigating worker behaviors that increase exposure to the ergonomically hazardous postures that can lead to a work-related musculoskeletal disorder), and (2) updated evaluation of the effectiveness of real-time RULA and REBA assessments integrated with real-time auditory and visual postural feedback intervention for ergonomic risk reduction.