Extended Reality and Motion Capture for Ergonomics in Industrial Contexts

In recent years, operator ergonomics has been playing an important role, driven by workplace regulations and worker safety in manufacturing settings characterized by physical demands and injury risks. Traditional ergonomic evaluation methods rely mainly on observation and manual measurements, which are subjective, reactive, and sometimes challenging to perform. Technologies, such as virtual reality devices and motion capture systems, offer opportunities to streamline data collection and enhance objectivity. Moreover, Industry 4.0 introduced digital twins, facilitating ergonomic evaluations in virtual environments. This paper presents a framework that integrates Virtual Reality technologies and motion capture analysis to support ergonomists in evaluating operators’ working conditions in manufacturing settings. The operator wears a head mounted display to simulate working tasks in a virtual replica of the real plant. An inertial motion capture system is employed to automate data gathering and processing for an objective evaluation of the operator’s postural condition. A Virtual Wall system is exploited by the ergonomist for the evaluation of the tasks using the motion captured data. A case study has been considered to test the functionality of the platform. A tester repeats a sequence of tasks both in real and virtual scenarios in order to compare the results. Ergonomics is evaluated through three standard indexes (i.e., RULA, REBA, OWAS), resulting in a strong correlation between data acquired interacting with physical and virtual environments.