Applicability Evaluation of Kinect for EAWS Ergonomic Assessments

Abstract With the availability of low cost, markerless motion capture systems, in manufacturing industry more and more companies apply this technology for ergonomics assessments without knowing the overall performance and limitations in advance. This paper presents an applicability evaluation of Kinect sensor’s motion capture performance to be used for ergonomics assessments. Even though literature has already presented application papers in manufacturing industry and ergonomic analysis, few papers are giving practical insights on the overall limitations. In particular, the European Assessment Work Sheet (EAWS) is applied as a reference, standardized method. EAWS working postures are systematically carried out in virtual domain and physical domain and are cross-checked with respect the results in EAWS. The results show, that 9 out of 11 working postures can be tracked well and tracking limitations are revealed. For several working postures, passive haptic feedback is required. Therefore, visually low occluding physical mock-ups are proposed.