An industrial IoT solution for evaluating workers' performance via activity recognition

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a key pillar of the Fourth Industrial Evolution or Industry 4.0. It aims to achieve direct information exchange between industrial machines, people, and processes. By tapping and analysing such data, IIoT can more importantly provide for significant improvements in productivity, product quality, and safety via proactive detection of problems in the performance and reliability of production machines, workers, and industrial processes. While the majority of existing IIoT research is currently focusing on the predictive maintenance of industrial machines (unplanned production stoppages lead to significant increases in costs and lost plant productivity), this paper focuses on monitoring and assessing worker productivity. This IIoT research is particularly important for large manufacturing plants where most production activities are performed by workers using tools and operating machines. With this aim, this paper introduces a novel industrial IoT solution for monitoring, evaluating, and improving worker and related plant productivity based on workers activity recognition using a distributed platform and wearable sensors. More specifically, this IIoT solution captures acceleration and gyroscopic data from wearable sensors in edge computers and analyses them in powerful processing servers in the cloud to provide a timely evaluation of the performance and productivity of each individual worker in the production line. These are achieved by classifying worker production activities and computing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) from the captured sensor data. We present a real-world case study that utilises our IIoT solution in a large meat processing plant (MPP). We illustrate the design of the IIoT solution, describe the in-plant data collection during normal operation, and present the sensor data analysis and related KPI computation, as well as the outcomes and lessons learnt.