Papers for
ergonomics consultants
Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.
Video passthrough headsets cause cautious movement and eye strain
Passthrough Rigidity: The Behavioral and Visuomotor Costs of Mediated Perception
Abstract: Broad public adoption of head-mounted displays using video passthrough remains elusive despite significant market investment. A precise understanding of why users experience persistent discomfort even as hardware factors such as resolution and latency have dramatically improved remains an open issue. This paper investigates the impact of viewing the world through video passthrough systems on human behavioral and physiological patterns through a large-scale multimodal study. We developed a novel protocol to capture synchronized oculomotor, kinematic, and physiological data during a block assembly task requiring complex hand-eye coordination. Using a within-subject design (N=110), we evaluated both natural and passthrough viewing conditions. Our results reveal a four-fold suppression of rotational head velocity and a pronounced decoupling of head-gaze coordination. This suggests motor caution being employed as an adaptive strategy - which we term "Passthrough Rigidity". This phenomenon appears to shift the information-gathering burden to the oculomotor system, resulting in significantly longer fixation durations and restricted visual search patterns. These kinematic shifts directly correlate with poorer task performance and measurable physiological cost, evidenced by a significant reduction in blink duration and increased reports of ocular strain and cognitive load. We conclude that current passthrough implementations induce a measurable shift from flexible exploration to motor caution, where task performance is preserved at the cost of user comfort and biomechanical efficiency. These findings provide a novel quantitative framework for evaluating and improving future XR devices, establishing that resolving "comfort" for passthrough requires addressing the deep-seated biomechanical compensations caused by mediated perception. Data available at https://data.nvision.eecs.yorku.ca/Passthrough
Open dataset captures human movement during retail robot guidance tasks
OHRID-Retail: An Open Multimodal Dataset of Human Activity in Retail Environments
Abstract: Open datasets describing human behavior in environments shared with mobile robots remain limited, particularly for retail activities that combine locomotion, reaching, object handling, and robot guided movement. This paper introduces OHRID Retail, an open, human centered multimodal dataset collected from 16 healthy adults performing a simulated shelf picking task under three within participant conditions: no robot, low speed robot guidance, and high speed robot guidance. Each participant completed two trials per condition. Whole body kinematics were recorded using 17 Xsens Awinda inertial sensors and muscle activity was measured at 10 locations using Delsys Trigno surface electromyography sensors. Descriptive analyses demonstrate variation in whole body movement intensity and muscle activation across robot interaction conditions and body locations. OHRID Retail provides openly available raw recordings, processed measures, documentation, and reproducible analysis resources. The dataset can support research in human activity recognition, multimodal sensor fusion, occupational biomechanics, ergonomics, human aware robot navigation, and human robot interaction in retail and related shared environments.