Promoting operator’s wellbeing in Industry 5.0: detecting mental and physical fatigue

Building on the benefits of Industry 4.0, Industry 5.0 promotes human-centricity of factories, placing operator’s wellbeing at the center of production. Production processes are expected to be designed around operator’s needs, for a more sustainable contribution of industry to society. In this broad context, in this paper we consider the problem of monitoring operator’s condition and, specifically, detecting any mental or physical fatigue they might be experiencing in workplaces. Indeed, if the onset of any source of fatigue is monitored, it is possible to introduce assistive strategies that preserve productivity, on the one side, and operator’s wellbeing, on the other side. To achieve this goal, we detect mental and physical fatigue conditions via physiological monitoring, by means of a wearable device that measures cardiac activity. We design an experimental protocol such that test participants are exposed to mental and physical fatigue. Their heart rate variability is then extracted and analysed to discriminate among rest, mental fatigue, physical fatigue and joint mental and physical fatigue. The achieved results show that statistically significant differences can be found in time-domain metrics. Moreover, the analysis of the empirical distribution functions shows, for each metrics, the conditions that exhibit the greatest differences and, hence, that can be distinguished more accurately. However, results show also that, in the presence of physical fatigue, it is difficult to detect the presence of additional mental fatigue.