Safe Assembly in Industry 5.0: Digital Architecture for the Ergonomic Assembly Worksheet

The evolving landscape of modern manufacturing is affected by a confluence of social challenges arising from demographic shifts and erratic market demands. The emergence of Industry 5.0 revolutionized practices, with a keen focus on harnessing the potential of the Internet of Things to digitize the workforce embracing a human-centric approach. In this research, an original digital architecture integrates sensors into manufacturing environments to evaluate the well-being of assembly operators. The core objective is to capture human-process interactions, empowering production managers to optimize assembly environments from the ergonomic perspective. Three key enabling technologies are employed: radio frequency identification smart gloves, motion capture cameras, and superficial electromyography sensors. This physical layer detects and analyzes assembly tasks, operator movements, and muscular activities. Computational algorithms mine these data streams to assess the Ergonomic Assembly Wor...

The evolving landscape of modern manufacturing is affected by a confluence of social challenges arising from demographic shifts and erratic market demands. The emergence of Industry 5.0 revolutionized practices, with a keen focus on harnessing the potential of the Internet of Things to digitize the workforce embracing a human-centric approach. In this research, an original digital architecture integrates sensors into manufacturing environments to evaluate the well-being of assembly operators. The core objective is to capture human-process interactions, empowering production managers to optimize assembly environments from the ergonomic perspective. Three key enabling technologies are employed: radio frequency identification smart gloves, motion capture cameras, and superficial electromyography sensors. This physical layer detects and analyzes assembly tasks, operator movements, and muscular activities. Computational algorithms mine these data streams to assess the Ergonomic Assembly Worksheet, automatically. In detail, the investigated sections of this ergonomic index are basic postures, action forces, and manual material handling. Furthermore, a supplementary set of Key Risk Indicators supports production managers in evaluating the physical resilience of the assembly systems. These operator-specific metrics provide strategic information to trigger workstation redesign, task rebalancing, and other corrective actions for enhancing the safety of whichever human-centric assembly process. Finally, an experimental campaign in a controlled industrial environment tests the architecture's effectiveness and potential to reduce the risks and enhance workforce health.