Virtual Reality and Smart Fabrics Speed Up Workplace Design Before Production Starts
Researchers have combined virtual reality with sensor-embedded textiles to let companies test workstation designs for ergonomic safety before building them. The real-time feedback system lets designers catch problems early, reducing costly redesigns and helping prevent worker injuries down the line.
Originaltitel: Using Virtual Reality and Smart Textiles to Assess the Design of Workstations
<p>This paper presents a solution that integrates a smart textiles systemwith virtual reality to assess the design of workstations from an ergonomics pointof view. By using the system, ergonomists, designers, engineers, and operators,can test design proposals of workstations in an immersive virtual environmentwhile they see their ergonomics evaluation results displayed in real-time.. Thesystem allows its users to evaluate the ergonomics of the workplace in a preproduction phase. The workstation design can be modified, enabling workstationdesigners to better understand, test and evaluate how to create successfulworkstation designs, eventually to be used by the operators in production. Thisapproach uses motion capture together with virtual reality and is aimed tocomplement and integrate with the use of digital human modelling (DHM)software at virtual stages of the production development process.</p>