Interactive tools for safety 4.0: virtual ergonomics and serious games in real working contexts

This paper presents an innovative safety training method based on digital ergonomics simulations and serious games, which are games that focus on education. Digital ergonomics is intended to disseminate the culture of safety among workers, while serious games are used to train the operators on specific safety procedures and verify their skills. The results of the experimentation in a real industrial environment showed that, compared to the traditional training methodology, multimedia contents and quantitative ergonomic analyses improve the level of attention and the awareness of the workers about their own safety. However, serious games turned out to be promising training tools with regard to standard operating procedures that are usually difficult or dangerous to simulate in a real working scenario without stopping production. Practitioner summary: Digital ergonomics and serious games are used to disseminate the culture of safety among the workers and for safety training. Our results show that the proposed methodology improves the level of attention and provides a better feedback about the actual skills of the workers than the standard educational strategies. Abbreviations.