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Towards Real-time Ergonomics Feedback and Educational Content with the use of Co-Robots

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Conference

2017 Mid-Atlantic Section Fall Conference

Location

Penn State University - Berks Campus - Reading, Pennsylvania

Publication Date

October 6, 2017

Start Date

October 6, 2017

End Date

October 7, 2017

Conference Session

Mid Atlantic Papers

Tagged Topic

Mid-Atlantic Section Fall Conference

Page Count

10

DOI

10.18260/1-2--29392

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/29392

Download Count

440

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Paper Authors

biography

Christian Enmanuel Lopez Pennsylvania State University, University Park Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0003-2801-4618

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Christian E. López, is currently a Ph.D. student at Harold and Inge Marcus Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University. He has worked as an Industrial Engineer in both the Service and Manufacturing sectors before pursuing his Ph.D. His current research focuses on the design and optimization of systems and intelligent assistive technologies through the acquisition, integration, and mining of large scale, disparate data. He is currently working on a project that ambitions to design a system capable of providing students customized motivational stimuli and performance feedback based on their affective states.

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biography

Conrad Tucker Pennsylvania State University, University Park

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Dr. Tucker holds a joint appointment as Assistant Professor in Engineering Design and Industrial Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University. He is also affiliate faculty in Computer Science and Engineering. He teaches Introduction to Engineering Design (EDSGN 100) at the undergraduate level and developed and taught a graduate-level course titled Data Mining–Driven Design (EDSGN 561). As part of the Engineering Design Program’s “Summers by Design” (SBD) program, Dr. Tucker supervises students from Penn State during the summer semester in a two-week engineering design program at the École Centrale de Nantes in Nantes, France.

Dr. Tucker is the director of the Design Analysis Technology Advancement (D.A.T.A) Laboratory. His research interests are in formalizing system design processes under the paradigm of knowledge discovery, optimization, data mining, and informatics. His research interests include applications in complex systems design and operation, product portfolio/family design, and sustainable system design optimization in the areas of engineering education, energy generation systems, consumer electronics, environment, and national security.

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Abstract

Engineering students will play a major role in the process of improving the ergonomics in the workplace. Nonetheless, studies indicate that engineering students are not familiar with the Human Factors & Ergonomics (HF&E) methods used to improve these systems. Therefore, more emphasis should be given to advance HF&E education. However, in this pursuit hands-on activities that promote active learning need to be encouraged in order to maintain students’ satisfaction and motivation. Moreover, the initial results from the case study presented in this work indicate that students’ HF&E knowledge needs to be improved, and that they frequently use improper lifting techniques. In light of this, the recent advancements in technology, that could potentially allow a Co-robot system to provide real-time ergonomic feedback and HF&E educational content to students, are explored. Such a system has the potential to help students better understand and experience firsthand how HF&E can be applied to improve the workplace. Even though the method proposed is in its initial design stages, its capabilities are promising and future work will focus on implementing the system in engineering lab environments.

Lopez, C. E., & Tucker, C. (2017, October), Towards Real-time Ergonomics Feedback and Educational Content with the use of Co-Robots Paper presented at 2017 Mid-Atlantic Section Fall Conference, Penn State University - Berks Campus - Reading, Pennsylvania. 10.18260/1-2--29392

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