Ergonomic risk assessment in lifting activities with Azure Kinect: an industrial case study

Work related musculoskeletal disorders (WMDs) are common in industrial activities and their impacts on society are not negligible. To reduce them recently some motion capture technologies (MOCAP) are applied to semi automatically calculate the ergonomic risk to which operators are subjected. In this paper we present an industrial case study where an application based on a depth camera, the new Azure Kinect, is exploited to semi-automatically calculate the ergonomic risk involved in picking activities. The case study took place in a warehouse and regarded three different activities. The semi-automatic evaluation of the ergonomic risk highlighted some criticalities on how picking activities are carried out. For this reason, some modifications of the activities are proposed and tested revealing a statistically significant ergonomic risk reduction.