Dias Barkokebas, R; Al-Hussein, M and Li, X (2022) VR-MOCAP-enabled ergonomic risk assessment of workstation prototypes in offsite construction. Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 148(8): 04022064, ISSN 0733-9364
Abstract
Workers in offsite construction facilities are often exposed to repetitive motion and awkward body postures that are associated with the risk of developing work-related musculoskeletal disorders despite the use of automated equipment on production lines. To reduce the exposure to these risks, an investigation of the physical demands that workstations impose on workers' bodies is needed. Since traditional methods used to collect human body motions have limitations, such as workplace interruptions and biased results due to subjective observation, this paper proposes a virtual reality (VR)-motion capture (MOCAP)-based ergonomic assessment method to evaluate ergonomic risks in a laboratory setting during the design phase of workstation development. It is expected that the number of iterations of physical workstation prototypes would be reduced if ergonomic risk ratings are identified proactively in the initial phases of workstation design, which would thereby reduce the cost and time required to develop and implement an improved workstation design. The present study includes a feasibility analysis of the proposed method in which participants representative of specific percentiles of the population based on their physical stature were invited to voluntarily participate in a research experiment. The results obtained demonstrate that the proposed method can successfully simulate the elemental motions, referred to as therbligs, of reaching and positioning (Pearson's correlation coefficient is found to equal 0.80 and 0.94, respectively), while the simulation of the assembling therblig requires further investigation. The contribution of this study is a virtual reality-motion captured-enabled ergonomic risk assessment method applied to workstation design for offsite construction production lines. In addition, the deployment of the proposed method allows a holistic ergonomic assessment that considers objective and subjective parameters.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | ergonomic risk assessment; ergonomics; motion capture; offsite construction; virtual reality |
| Index terms: | construction production, laboratory, exposure, population, virtual reality, risk assessment, prototype, experiment, investigation, design phase, construction worker, ergonomics |
| Subjects: | modelling and simulation, financial risk, research management, operations management, occupational health and safety management, professional practice, practitioner, demography, virtual reality, data collection methods, public and environmental health |
| Topics: | Design Practice, Research Practice, Roles and Professions, Digital Applications, Engineering Principles, Health and Safety, Urban Studies, Site Management, Cost Management |
| Descriptive scope: | 4 PCEA |
N.B. Descriptive scope is a count of how many of the five facets of empirical research are indicated by the words used in title, abstract and keywords. It is not intended as a judgement on the research; merely a count of the kind of word we would expect to indicate Phenomenon, Concepts, Theoretical framing, Empirical techniques, Analytical techniques. If all five are present, then a code of “5 PCTEA” will indicate this. If you feel the coding for this record is questionable, we welcome discussion around the terms we matched or the way we categorized them. The facet you would expect may not be coded, or a facet may be coded inappropriately. This can also bear on a larger question, of which facets should be treated as defining in construction management research. Please get in touch, and we will look at it. More details here