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Ergonomic-Monitoring of Office Workplaces Using Kinect

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Ambient Assisted Living and Daily Activities (IWAAL 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 8868))

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Abstract

Prolonged sitting is an aggravating factor in low back and neck pain. Increased use of computers at workplaces could therefore cause health risks. This paper evaluates the application of the Microsoft Kinect in order to in-vestigate the ergonomics at the place of employment. The Kinect is a cheap device and commercially available which enables the user to record 3D data of the human body. Within this paper, guidelines for the ’ideal’ placement of the Kinect are provided in order to enhance the robustness of the skeleton recog-nition algorithm. An evaluation of 35 sequences (7 different positions in com-bination with 5 different sitting postures) showed that placing the Kinect sen-sor slantingly forward at an angle of 20° (in front of the subject) the joint rec-ognition rate achieved 89.62%. According to these results, the device should be positioned between 20° to 45° in order to robustly track a sitting person.

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© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Wiedemann, L.G., Planinc, R., Kampel, M. (2014). Ergonomic-Monitoring of Office Workplaces Using Kinect. In: Pecchia, L., Chen, L.L., Nugent, C., Bravo, J. (eds) Ambient Assisted Living and Daily Activities. IWAAL 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8868. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13105-4_40

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13105-4_40

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-13104-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-13105-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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