The Application of Digital Worker Assistance Systems to Support Workers with Disabilities in Assembly Processes

Abstract

When looking at the last few decades, industrial manufacturing has undergone a continuous change. While years ago, the operator was not given much attention, now in the fourth industrial revolution (also Industry 4.0) the worker himself comes to the fore. An additional aspect through which the worker emerges in the context of industry is the ever-increasing shortage of skilled workers together with the demographic change. This leads to a progress in the development of worker assistance systems for supporting the operator during his/her daily work. Looking precisely at the workers in today’s manufacturing production reveals a large variety of different user groups with diverse needs. This paper focuses specifically on one user group, namely people with disabilities. The study was conducted together with a social enterprise in which people with mental/physical disabilities do mostly assembly work for other companies. Necessary capabilities for workers in general were collected through interviews with stakeholder associations, companies, and employees. Together with the supervising employees of a social enterprise, the necessary capabilities for the workers with disabilities were identified and compared with the necessary ones to conduct the assembly process. Subsequently, experiments were made with a digital worker assistance system to investigate the effectiveness of this system. The results show an overall positive acceptance of the target group towards assistance systems and an increase in process accuracy and process success.