Human posture tracking system for industrial process design and assessment

One of the critical issues characterizing the manufacturing industries, which within Industry 4.0 era are experiencing the new human-centered approach in design, is related to working postures assumed by the workers in assembly activities. In order to study the motion of human body, the research team developed an inertial MoCap system, composed by IMUs. The system allows to estimate the attitude of the fundamental segments of the human body, by using a Kalman filtering, and to evaluate the posture angles assumed during the motion. The system is modular, composed by 4 modules, made of 4 sensors. From acquired data it is possible to code algorithms to online assess the desired ergonomic scores, making the system able to take decisions for the workplace design optimization. In this paper, the full body inertial MoCap system is presented, supported by a test case to prove the reliability of the system in industrial environment.