Scoring of Human Body-Balance Ability on Wobble Board Based on the Geometric Solution

An ergonomic evaluation using a deep learning approach for assessing postural risks in a virtual reality-based smart manufacturing context

This study proposes an integrated ergonomic evaluation designed to identify unsafe postures, whereby postural risks during industrial work are assessed in the context of virtual reality-based smart manufacturing. Unsafe postures were recognised by identifying the displacements of the centre of mass (COM) of body keypoints using a computer vision-based deep learning (DL) convolutional neural network approach. The risk levels for the identified unsafe postures were calculated using ergonomic risk assessment tools rapid upper limb assessment and rapid whole-body assessment. An analysis of variance was conducted to determine significant differences between the vertical and horizontal directions of postural movements associated with the most unsafe postures. The findings assess the ergonomic risk levels and identify the most unsafe postures during industrial work in smart manufacturing using DL method. The identified postural risks can help industry managers and researchers acquire a better understanding of unsafe postures.

Comparative Analysis of Skeleton-Based Human Pose Estimation

Human pose estimation (HPE) has become a prevalent research topic in computer vision. The technology can be applied in many areas, such as video surveillance, medical assistance, and sport motion analysis. Due to higher demand for HPE, many HPE libraries have been developed in the last 20 years. In the last 5 years, more and more skeleton-based HPE algorithms have been developed and packaged into libraries to provide ease of use for researchers. Hence, the performance of these libraries is important when researchers intend to integrate them into real-world applications for video surveillance, medical assistance, and sport motion analysis. However, a comprehensive performance comparison of these libraries has yet to be conducted. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate the strengths and weaknesses of four popular state-of-the-art skeleton-based HPE libraries for human pose detection, including OpenPose, PoseNet, MoveNet, and MediaPipe Pose. A comparative analysis of these libraries based on images and videos is presented in this paper. The percentage of detected joints (PDJ) was used as the evaluation metric in all comparative experiments to reveal the performance of the HPE libraries. MoveNet showed the best performance for detecting different human poses in static images and videos.