Automatic assessment system of operators’ risk in order picking process for task analysis

Abstract

It is necessary to consider operators’ health in order picking (OP). Automatic systems have been developed to offer posture risk feedback to operators but a lack of activity information limits the application of such systems in analyzing OP tasks and improving OP systems. Thus, this study develops an automatic risk evaluation system integrated with activity information in OP for task analysis. Proposed system is a full-body motion capture system including three steps. Firstly, joint angles are calculated using orientation of related IMUs and REBA is implemented to compute posture risk scores. Then, a rule-based method is proposed to automatically detect picking activities. Finally, task analysis is performed by determining percentage of time spent at different risk levels of different activities during task. In a user experiment, questionnaire feedback from participants agreed with the task analysis results and the results provided insight on how to improve the OP system.