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Brambilla C, Lavit Nicora M, Storm F, Reni G, Malosio M, Scano A. Biomechanical Assessments of the Upper Limb for Determining Fatigue, Strain and Effort from the Laboratory to the Industrial Working Place: A Systematic Review. Bioengineering (Basel) 2023; 10:bioengineering10040445. [PMID: 37106632 PMCID: PMC10135542 DOI: 10.3390/bioengineering10040445] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/02/2023] [Revised: 03/24/2023] [Accepted: 04/03/2023] [Indexed: 04/08/2023] Open
Abstract
Recent human-centered developments in the industrial field (Industry 5.0) lead companies and stakeholders to ensure the wellbeing of their workers with assessments of upper limb performance in the workplace, with the aim of reducing work-related diseases and improving awareness of the physical status of workers, by assessing motor performance, fatigue, strain and effort. Such approaches are usually developed in laboratories and only at times they are translated to on-field applications; few studies summarized common practices for the assessments. Therefore, our aim is to review the current state-of-the-art approaches used for the assessment of fatigue, strain and effort in working scenarios and to analyze in detail the differences between studies that take place in the laboratory and in the workplace, in order to give insights on future trends and directions. A systematic review of the studies aimed at evaluating the motor performance, fatigue, strain and effort of the upper limb targeting working scenarios is presented. A total of 1375 articles were found in scientific databases and 288 were analyzed. About half of the scientific articles are focused on laboratory pilot studies investigating effort and fatigue in laboratories, while the other half are set in working places. Our results showed that assessing upper limb biomechanics is quite common in the field, but it is mostly performed with instrumental assessments in laboratory studies, while questionnaires and scales are preferred in working places. Future directions may be oriented towards multi-domain approaches able to exploit the potential of combined analyses, exploitation of instrumental approaches in workplace, targeting a wider range of people and implementing more structured trials to translate pilot studies to real practice.
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Affiliation(s)
- Cristina Brambilla
- Istituto di Sistemi e Tecnologie Industriali Intelligenti per il Manifatturiero Avanzato (STIIMA), Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR), Via Previati 1/E, 23900 Lecco, Italy
| | - Matteo Lavit Nicora
- Istituto di Sistemi e Tecnologie Industriali Intelligenti per il Manifatturiero Avanzato (STIIMA), Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR), Via Previati 1/E, 23900 Lecco, Italy
- Industrial Engineering Department, University of Bologna, 40126 Bologna, Italy
| | - Fabio Storm
- Bioengineering Laboratory, Scientific Institute, IRCCS “Eugenio Medea”, 23842 Bosisio Parini, Italy
| | - Gianluigi Reni
- Informatics Department, Autonomous Province of Bolzano, 39100 Bolzano, Italy
| | - Matteo Malosio
- Istituto di Sistemi e Tecnologie Industriali Intelligenti per il Manifatturiero Avanzato (STIIMA), Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR), Via Previati 1/E, 23900 Lecco, Italy
| | - Alessandro Scano
- Istituto di Sistemi e Tecnologie Industriali Intelligenti per il Manifatturiero Avanzato (STIIMA), Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR), Via Previati 1/E, 23900 Lecco, Italy
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Sunesson CE, Schøn DT, Hassø CNP, Chinello F, Fang C. PREDICTOR: A Physical emulatoR enabling safEty anD ergonomICs evaluation and Training of physical human-rObot collaboRation. Front Neurorobot 2023; 17:1080038. [PMID: 36860936 PMCID: PMC9968835 DOI: 10.3389/fnbot.2023.1080038] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/25/2022] [Accepted: 01/18/2023] [Indexed: 02/16/2023] Open
Abstract
Safety and ergonomics of Physical Human-Robot Collaboration (PHRC) are crucial to make human-robot collaborative systems trustworthy and make a significant impact in real-world applications. One big obstacle to the development of relevant research is the lack of a general platform for evaluating the safety and ergonomics of proposed PHRC systems. This paper aims to create a Physical emulatoR enabling safEty anD ergonomICs evaluation and Training of physical human-rObot collaboRation (PREDICTOR). PREDICTOR consists of a dual-arm robot system and a VR headset as its hardware and contains physical simulation, haptic rendering and visual rendering modules as its software. The dual-arm robot system is used as an integrated admittance-type haptic device, which senses the force/torque applied by a human operator as an input to drive the simulation of a PHRC system and constrains the handles' motion to match their virtual counterparts in the simulation. The motion of the PHRC system in the simulation is fed back to the operator through the VR headset. PREDICTOR combines haptics and VR to emulate PHRC tasks in a safe environment since the interactive forces are monitored to avoid any risky events. PREDICTOR also brings flexibility as different PHRC tasks can be easily set up by changing the PHRC system model and the robot controller in the simulation. The effectiveness and performance of PREDICTOR were evaluated by experiments.
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Affiliation(s)
- Carl Emil Sunesson
- SDU Robotics, The Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller Institute, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark
| | - Daniel Tofte Schøn
- SDU Robotics, The Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller Institute, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark
| | | | - Francesco Chinello
- Business Development and Technology, Aarhus University, Herning, Denmark
| | - Cheng Fang
- SDU Robotics, The Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller Institute, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark,*Correspondence: Cheng Fang ✉
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