Breaking the barriers: multilingual user engagement to increase process engagement and technology acceptance in manufacturing

Abstract

With the start of Industry 5.0, there is greater emphasis on increased workforce sustainability. Manufacturing among other industries realised the economic importance not only of increased production efficiency, but the positive impact physical and psychological workforce wellbeing has on the company. The current paper presents a three-step approach of engaging multicultural end users for robotic technology introduction in the manufacturing where language dependent knowledge capture is challenging. The first step is video analysis of the process to determine which human factors might be key contributors to the existing processes. The second proposed step is process observation while the operators wear eye tracking glasses combined with several questions for the process clarification. This step allows to determine decision making points and visual attention sequence. Finally, a focus group conducted with small group of representative operators. The paper will introduce the use cases and protocol to achieve a two-fold aim: (i) feedback to the technology developers and engineers, the user critical aspects of the existing aspects, and (ii) to increase user acceptance and engagement with the developing technology/processes. The user acceptance and engagement with the final solution is expected to be improved due to the proposed three step engagement program delivered at the start of the project.