Development of a 4.0 industry application for increasing occupational safety: guidelines for a correct approach

The Wearable Augmented Reality for employee safety in Manufacturing systems (W-Artemys) project aims to create a new technological support to increase the employee safety during operations on machines. Within the framework of this project, this paper will show the development’s path of an easy-to-use software to enhance the operator’s safety, highlighting the main difficulties encountered especially during the development of the database needed to support the application. In line with the concept of Industry 4.0, the W-Artemys software has been built to handle all the pieces of information coming from machines manuals and allowing the operator to use the software on a mobile device, coupled with an augmented reality solution. Due to the long work necessary to develop the various software elements, continuous evaluations have been made with the aim to highlight potential critical issues and compare the different ways to use the W-Artemys platform (mobile device vs. augmented reality). Different and intermediate tests will finally allow to evaluate whether the use of augmented reality will lead to improvement in the employee safety compared to the classic manual way and or to an easier software. To simulate the development of the database and the use of the software, this latter has been applied to an aseptic filling machine, which consists of different components and involves different maintenance operations. Appropriate data were retrieved to this end.