Augmented manufacturing: a study with impaired persons on assistive systems using in-situ projection

Production work requires a high level of awareness and especially manual assembly work is prone to human errors. At the same time the demand for manual assembly grows. Assistive systems in production environments (ASiPE) have to be augmented to improve the overall performance and reduce skill requirements. In this study the prototype of an augmented ASiPE is applied in an experiment with impaired persons. It uses in-situ projection (i.e. the projection of work-relevant information directly into the working space, Figures 1, 8) to cognitively assist users in assembly and to improve their inclusion in regular work processes. The aim is to observe their behavior with this new form of human computer interaction and to empirically quantify the effects on performance both in time and quality. The results show that the augmentation has a catalytic effect: The test subjects assembling slowly could not cope with the augmented ASiPE and performed worse than their counterparts without augmentation. The test subjects who worked faster than average assembled the product significantly better, both with respect to time (14.5% reduction) and especially to quality (45.8% error reduction). The ability to access the potential of augmented workplaces seems to be related to a worker' cognitive potential which is not adequately mapped by the competence ratios sheltered work organizations currently use.