Human Work Design: Modern Approaches for Designing Ergonomic and Productive Work in Times of Digital Transformation – An International Perspective

Abstract

Today, enabling productive and ergonomic work processes, work methods and work systems plays a significant role and in the future, it is going to gain even more significance. The “Ergonomic Assessment Worksheet” (EAWS) is a screening tool to assess the physical workload on the human body in different workplaces. It was developed for ongoing production and for production planning in the automotive industry and similar industries. With EAWS, physical stress can be assessed in a very detailed way without requiring a lot of effort. Aspects of successive stress superposition can be greatly simplified for short cycle tasks. The results of the evaluation are the basis for the communication between management and workers councils. The new process building block systems Human Work Design (MTM-HWD^®) describes motions of people in conjunction with an ergonomics assessments procedure - in this case EAWS - in one step. This way, it allows a direct correlation in designing productive and ergonomic work. This contribution presents principles, practical application cases and the standardized education concept of EAWS and MTM-HWD^® in the light of their international application.

For both methodologies, capturing or tracking of motions is essential in order to collect information about body postures of human beings, forces and loads for manual handling as well as information of the frequency of the repetitiveness of the upper limbs. An automatic collection of these kind of data by a motion capturing suit (AXS) and the connected gloves as well as the evaluation of the collected data by an EAWS and MTM-HWD^® analysis will also be presented in this contribution from a theoretical and practical (business case) perspective.