PARTAS: A Personalizable Augmented Reality Based Task Adaption System forWorkers with Cognitive Disabilities

Commercially available assembly systems for industrial settings do not address the needs and requirements of people with disabilities and sheltered workshops. This is due to the complexity of the system's setup including hardware, software and application in combination with the workers' and supervisors' capabilities. In the case of sheltered workshops, resources for implementing functionalities and accessibility requirements push expenses beyond available resources. In this work, we present a prototype of an intuitive, adaptive and cost-efficient worker assistance system utilizing only one RGB camera, one projector and a small single-board computer. The system implements a combination of projected, contour-based instructions and pick-by-projection functionality with the goal of maximizing the instructions' affordance. An interdisciplinary team including workers from a sheltered workshop, their caregivers, technicians and a psychologist followed an iterative user-centered design methodology approach based on two personas with different cognitive disability profiles. Finally, we conducted a user study based on eight participants matching the main persona. All participants showed a strong learning rate and performed successfully completely new assembly tasks after a short training phase with the proposed system.