AI and ‘cobots’ to empower older members of the workforce
Older workers are a growing part of the workforce. The EU-27 employment rate for people aged 55–64 years has increased from 40.5 % in 2005 to 58.5 % in 2018. This is still well below the employment rate of those aged 20-64 years, which stood at 72.6 % in 2018. Many attributes, such as strategic thinking, holistic perception and the ability to deliberate, either increase or first emerge with age. But some functional capacities, mainly physical and sensory, decline as a result of the natural ageing process. The EU-funded CO-ADAPT project developed tools to empower ageing citizens to adapt to changing conditions and abilities, as well as smart adaptations in the work systems themselves.
Smart shift scheduling
Targeting shift workers, industry workers operating robots, knowledge workers and computer users over the age of 50, CO-ADAPT developed solutions that support workability and well-being. “Workability is often conceptualised as the balance between work demands and individual resources,” says the project’s coordinator Giulio Jacucci. “For example, shift work is an important portion of the workforce. But shift scheduling requires complex decision making on the length, timing, and intensity of daily and weekly working hour patterns, and ageing is associated with decreasing work ability, and increased health risks caused by disturbed sleep and insufficient recovery.” To address this challenge, the project contributed to developing a smart shift scheduling tool that takes the possible health risks of shift work into account and creates a collaborative approach to shift planning between the worker and employer. It was shown to decrease sickness absence by nearly 10 % and improve the well-being of employees compared to those using traditional scheduling.
Personal health agents and work assistants
Mental and physical wellbeing is a growing concern, particularly considering the effects of the pandemic and work stressors for ageing workers. CO-ADAPT successfully demonstrated the use of a conversational agent to support wellbeing interventions in real cases. The technology can play an important role in motivating senior workers to adhere to therapies that improve their mental and physical health. The adoption of this technology boosted the success rate of health interventions by reducing the number of dropouts. Another ‘agent’ the project developed is an entity recommender, an AI assistant that recommends useful information to a worker based on the task they are working on. Jacucci highlights that this use of AI is a “very important human-centred innovation, at a time when recommendation algorithms are mainly used for advertisement, or for social media personalisation. Its adoption would require the right channel and readiness of the market.”
Intelligent workbenches and ‘cobots’
Finally, the CO-ADAPT project also developed an adaptive assembly workstation with a collaborative robot, or ‘cobot’. In this solution, workers wear non-intrusive devices that measure their real-time stress and physical/mental overload by monitoring parameters like cardiac activity and eye activity. Based on this sensory input, the embedded psychophysiological algorithm allows the workbench to implement different adaptations to help operators perform their job. This can include supporting workflow with multimedia instruction, guiding workers’ attention through the physical workspace via a pick-to-light system, modulating cobot behaviour, etc. “The collaborative robot, especially in its ability to adapt to cognitive states and abilities, is a novel solution with lower readiness,” says Jacucci.
Keywords
CO-ADAPT, active ageing, workers, workforce, shift work, cobot, workstation, AI