A comprehensive UX index to evaluate industrial tasks from a human-centered perspective

Recent advances in physiological monitoring devices have supported the diffusion of a human-centric approach also within industrial contexts, where often severe working conditions limit the analysis of the operators’ User eXperience (UX). Several methodologies have been presented to the scientific community to assess the overall UX of workers performing industrial operations. These methodologies have also tried to encompass the diverse aspects of the physiological response (e.g., mental workload, stress conditions and postural overloads). The current study aims to refine a unique and comprehensive UX index to identify the specific causes of the user discomfort in advance and to optimize the overall system design. A full set of non-invasive wearable devices was applied to a virtual reality (VR) simulation while performing manual operations to collect relevant physiological parameters and to finally assess the overall UX. The results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed index in anticipating the operator’s critical conditions by specifying the possible causes of the ergonomic discomfort. Future works will focus on investigating the theoretical foundation of proposed solution and on providing a statistical validation on a larger population.