Incorporating motion analysis technology into modular arrangement of predetermined time standard (MODAPTS)

• A motion analysis method based on Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is proposed.
• The PCA-based motion analysis is more efficient & time-saving.
• Integrating motion analysis into MODAPTS helps to formulate the standard working time more conveniently and accurately.

Implementing new strategies to achieve higher work efficiency is essential to improve productivity during a monotonous and exhausting work task. The Modular Arrangement of Predetermined Time Standard (MODAPTS) concept is widely used to achieve these goals in the field of human factors. However, MODAPTS is very complicated with regard to assisting engineers in understanding the system because it requires much learning time and even longer hours of effort during coding manual process. To help overcome the deficiency of the traditional method, a modern method for motion analysis, called PCA-based motion analysis, is proposed in this paper. Motion analysis has already been the main approach to analyze human motion in sports science and biometrics, but it is still unfamiliar for human factors analysts. This paper discusses a potential connection between motion analysis technology and MODAPTS analysis, which would help make MODAPTS more efficient and reliable. In the experiment, fifteen participants were asked to watch a motion sequence and then analyze the motion sequence using MODAPTS. Meanwhile, the motion-captured data were carefully segmented into motion elements with the PCA approach. A comparison of the motion segmentation contrast was made between MODAPTS analysis and automatic motion element segmentation using PCA. The accuracy rate of segmentation by the PCA approach was 80.08%, and the primitive frames of the two methods indicated that the segmentation is acceptable. In addition, the PCA-based motion analysis showed a substantial time-saving difference in the processing time, which was only approximately 3 min for motion analysis versus over 1 h for MODAPTS. Motion analysis provides high efficiency and reliability for motion segmentation and sufficient precision compared to the results using MODAPTS. Moreover, assessment of the operations’ rationality and optimization of the production line design instead of repetitive work on motion segmentation is the focus. Integrating motion analysis technology into traditional MODAPTS is a useful advancement that permits significant progress for human factors analysis. In the future, the accuracy of the automatic segmentation techniques should be improved.Relevance to industryIn recent years, motion analysis technology has become increasingly popular in various fields but not in the field of human factors. The automatic method presented in this paper may allow industrial workers to optimize unreasonable motion, remove unnecessary operations and formulate the standard working time more conveniently and accurately.