Ergonomic Evaluation of an Active Exoskeleton During Multi-Task Manual Lifting: A preliminary Study using AzKCLI.

Work-related musculoskeletal disorders significantly impact industrial productivity and society. With the advent of Industry 5.0, the safety and comfort of human operators are essential for modern production systems. In this context, many innovative technologies have been developed for ergonomic purposes. Exoskeletons are used to support workers and reduce lifting jobs. Motion Capture technologies are applied to evaluate ergonomic risk in an easier, faster and less expensive way. In this paper, we evaluate the risk involved in multi-task manual lifting jobs with and without the assistance of an active exoskeleton through Motion Capture Technology. For this purpose, three different picking routines were performed by five different subjects in a laboratory environment using the Azure Kinect depth camera. Risk assessment was carried out through an Azure Kinect-based tool to automatically calculate the Composite Lifting Index named AzKCLI. Results showed that the usage of the exoskeleton during multi-task manual lifting jobs had a subjective influence on each volunteer’s posture. However, the average risk related to posture did not increase.