Wearable devices for health and safety in production systems: a literature review

Abstract

The industrial 4.0 paradigm has also led to the spread of wearable devices in work contexts. These devices, first developed in the medical field and then disseminated for tracking daily life and physical well-being data for personal use, present different functionalities suitable for industrial environments, especially for monitoring of psychological and physiological factors of employees and promoting the health and safety of the worker. However, few studies have focused on this specific application through wearable devices, such as smartwatches, wristbands, wearable IMU devices, or EEG devices. For this reason, this paper aims to address the use of these types of wearable devices in the production systems for monitoring operator health and safety focusing on the physiological and movement variables/signals measured and monitored and their relationship with workers' conditions such as stress or physical fatigue.