Multimedia Video-Based Data Acquisition and Analysis Applications for Ergonomics Research

Abstract

Ergonomics field studies often require recording biomechanical data corresponding to kinematic, kinetic, or other physiologic records in relation to arbitrary events and human activities. These events are usually identified off-line from video recordings made of the action. An example is recording movements of an automobile assembly operator (See Figure 1) as the operator performs the various tasks of the job. Only by reviewing video records frame-by-frame, can the exact actions made by the operator at any point in time be identified. The biomechanics data corresponding with these actions can be obtained if the data is first synchronized with the video recordings. Multimedia video based data acquisition systems enable synchronization of the video and data records so that an analyst can randomly and interactively access sampled data corresponding to arbitrary events. Multimedia video-based systems are now available and are being used in a variety of ergonomics research applications for analyzing activities and conducting tasks analyses, quantifying temporal aspects of the task, and for synchronization of task elements with sampled data records. Some of these systems not only allow the analyst to visualize data associated with a specific video frame or event, but also to view the specific video frame that corresponds to a particular aspect of the data waveform. This symposium will present a variety of biomechanical and ergonomics research that uses multimedia video task analysis systems.