Ergonomic safety analysis is crucial for industrial assembly processes because it helps to identify potential hazards and risks associated with the physical and mental workload demands placed on workers. These risks can arise from various factors such as repetitive motions, awkward postures, heavy lifting, and prolonged standing or sitting. Failure to identify and address these ergonomic hazards can result in a variety of adverse outcomes for workers, including musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs), fatigue, decreased productivity, and increased absenteeism. MSDs are a common type of workplace injury caused by ergonomic hazards and can lead to chronic pain, reduced mobility, and even disability.
Conducting an ergonomic safety analysis can help identify areas for improvement in the assembly process to minimize ergonomic hazards and reduce the risk of workplace injuries. By analyzing workstations, tools, and equipment, and adjusting them to better fit the physical requirements of workers, ergonomic safety analysis can improve worker comfort, productivity, and overall job satisfaction. In addition to preventing injuries and promoting worker health, a comprehensive ergonomic safety analysis can also benefit employers by reducing costs associated with workers’ compensation claims and lost productivity due to work-related injuries.
Pathfinder provides computer vision based “in-process” health and safety analytics as part of the platform. The solution allows analyzing videos recorded from ordinary phone cameras, either using Pathfinder Android or iPhone app or by uploading videos through the web portal. Pathfinder uses its state-of-the-art computer vision technology to compute 3D skeletal poses and extract 3D joint angles. Our technology is optimized for industrial use cases emphasizing a certain degree of robustness to partial obfuscation as well as extreme postures of the human body. This has significant advantages over wearables, goniometers, or Marker-Based Motion Capture Systems. It allows flexible application include the use of a moving camera, and in adapting to crammed or crowded spaces and is therefore easier to scale. Finally the computer vision solution typically captures more information than a small group of markers, e.g. regarding body shape.
Pathfinder’s Ergonomics solution rapidly identifies high risk intervals in recorded videos which enables staffers who are not Ergonomists to home in on significant issues, without needing to observe the process manually for a long time. Pathfinder automates NIOSH-recommended REBA, RULA, and OWAS assessments. NIOSH, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, is the research arm of OSHA (US Occupational Safety and Health Administration). The solution further automates generation of ergonomics reports in Microsoft Excel format including exporting to Motion Capture (MoCap) i.e. BVH format.
Pathfinder also provides prescriptive recommendations on the most important joints to focus on for a process and how the relevant risk scores can be brought down. It achieves this by working backwards from the REBA, RULA, and OWAS scores as well as by invoking our LeanGPT AI models to leverage expert-level knowledge relating to human biomechanics.
| REBA (Rapid Entire Body Assessment) | Evaluates whole body posture, force required in lifting, pushing, pulling, and carrying, as well as frequency and duration. |
| RULA (Rapid Upper Limb Assessment) | Evaluates upper body posture + movement, relevant for benchtop work. |
| OWAS (Ovako Working Posture Analysis System) | Analyzes static postures, measures degree of deviation from a neutral posture. |
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Brandin and his team help our customers with setting up the Pathfinder platform and getting up-to-speed on all the features and functionalities, in addition to assisting them with standardizing their processes where needed.
Brandin is a seasoned manufacturing leader, who has spent more than a decade designing and setting up assembly lines in both the US and China, optimizing them, and working with human operators to maximize productivity and quality.
Huy takes our product roadmap and figures out what’s achievable with today’s AI advances, and what we need to invent to solve our customers’ pain points.
Huy led teams of scientists and engineers at NEC and invented technologies for driver assistance systems that are part of 500,000+ Honda cars. He is an inventor on more than 20 US patents, and his research papers are cited by every lab from MIT, Stanford, and CMU to Apple, Google, and Baidu.
Jesse works closely with our marquis customers to understand their needs, and figures out the best solution that immediately adds dollars to their bottom line.
Jesse has two decades of enterprise sales experience. He has held sales leadership roles at pioneering technology startups.
Andrey takes inventions and converts them into innovations. He leads our product engineering team to turn our scientific prototypes into robust customer-facing products.
Andrey co-founded and successfully exited a startup to immigrate to the US. He spent his next eight years building the core data science infrastructure for Amazon’s supply chain planning team, and the CV/ML infrastructure for Microsoft’s HoloLens organization.
Zeeshan focuses on delighting our customers by understanding their needs and defining product and strategy to meet and exceed these needs. He works closely with our sales leadership to grow our customer base.
Zeeshan was a scientific leader at Microsoft’s HoloLens division, where he invented AI technologies to assist frontline workers across industries. Earlier, he shipped IoT platforms and visual defect detection software for manufacturers at Siemens and MVTec GmbH.
