Analysis of brainwaves behavior, employing different standard times during the assembly of a product with legos for manufacturing applications

Abstract

The information provided by brainwaves allows the identification of many things such as: mental diseases, fatigue, stress, attention span and level of engagement, for example in the area of logistics, transportation accidents occurred due to driver’s fatigue. These accidents might be prevented by monitoring the cognitive states with the help of Electroencephalograms (EEG), with a substantial impact in the supply chain processes. Nowadays, manual assembly operations are still used in the industry, in spite of the current technological advances. The experiment carried in this work comprised the manual assembly of a Legos car containing 122 small pieces. The production line in a laboratory setting was divided into three work stations. The experiment length was three hours for each person. Also, in each hour the standard time was changed in order to increase the mental work load of the workers. The first hour was performed at 100%, the second at 80% and the third at 70% of the standard time. The Emotiv Epoc wireless device and the Emotiv Pro software were used to record brain activity (EEG). This work focused in the existence of differences regarding the behavior of brainwaves within the three people who performed the experiment and, also in the presence of differences during the three standard times. The results of the study showed that, there is a statistically significant difference when working with three different standard times and there are also differences in the brainwaves behavior of the people who performed the experiment.