[classyfast]

Originally Posted by LinkF1

You're wrong, these aids will significantly reduce worker injury rates, improve the quality of the product, and reduce cost.

While workforce wellness programs are a great investment, they are not often compulsory and therefore have limited effectiveness. The repetitive stress that employees get from these types of jobs is much different than what you would do as exercise. For example let us assume that the employee has to place each of those small plates in the task at 3:15 in the video. Assume the metal it is picking up is 225 grams (0.5 lb), picked up every 10 seconds. By using the robot BMW is removing 360 cycles and 81 kg (180 lbs) per hour from the worker's responsibilities. The robot also can place that part with a high degree of accuracy and work 24 hours a day if needed.

Note that the employee still has to lift the pre-processed and then the completed part, there are still highly repetitive tasks in this work environment. The robot likely replaced the task that the employees had the most trouble completing which is usually a source of quality defects.

Some good points definitely, and 100% agree with QC improvement.....but let me expand on worker wellness programs from my view and from my particular industry, which is not automotive, but hear me out.

I'm a regional director of environmental health and safety for the 4th largest privately held company in this country. We employ about 15k warehouse workers whose primary function is to pick and lift 20-30,000lbs of product daily and their work is incentive based. Highly repetitive work. Good safety behaviors, good quality and good performance can make you 50-80k a year depending on what you do vs our engineered labor standards. That's 50-80k a year with a highschool diploma only.

We invest heavily in preventative stretching programs, self massage techniques, trigger point self applied therapy, heavy duty nutrition programs and we typically have stretching/gym space at all locations ran by what we call "motion coaches". Aside from the occasionally bad material handling equipment injuries, we had lots of ergonomic injuries over my last 9 years there. So we tried support belts, they don't work and they weaken your core/back/abs. We tried corrective ergo devices that don't allow you to lift without using your legs, the concept is great but they wear quickly and become ineffective after they're broken in. We've tried skeletal support devices to "ramp-up" folks that have been injured and they too don't work. These assistant devices, which support, supplement or add to workers abilities have one thing in common....they lessen the workers physical output. However you chose to look at that, you must acknowledge that this deconditions the human operating that apparatus.


What I've found is that for my industry the repetitive motion and the fact that folks stay in motion strengthens the muscles and keeps our folks active and relatively healthy. Our proactive health programs have by far been our best ROI. Now in my world , folks are paid to stretch pre-shift and typically paid time to have our "motion" coaches work with them so they have to participate. Easy as that. In 5 years we have saved over 50m in insurance, incurred medical and workmans comp claims dollars doing this. We are also 7x's safer than the industry average for occupational rate of injury in warehousing nation-wide so that works for us.

The guy that mentioned this can be used for disabled folks is spot on, that's probably the best application for stuff like this.