Event-Based Activity Tracking in Work Environments

Wearable computers aim to empower people by providing relevant information at appropriate time. This context-based information delivery helps to perform intricate, tedious or critical tasks and improves productivity, decreases error rates, and thus results in a reduction of labor cost. To evaluate the usability of wearable computing in a work environment, we have chosen a car production scenario in which new employees are trained for mechanical assembly tasks. In this paper we describe the implementation of an activity tracking system that allows to detect the individual steps of assembling a front lamp into a car body. Our approach is to break down these steps of the assembly task into smaller units, so called discrete events. Body-worn and environmental sensors are employed to create these events which trigger transitions in a Finite State Machine (FSM). The FSM states represent user activities which correspond to the assembly steps.