Ergonomic postural assessment using a new open-source human pose estimation technology (OpenPose)

Observational ergonomic postural assessment methods have been commonly used to evaluate the risks of musculoskeletal disorders. Researchers have proposed semi-automatic methods using Kinect, known for limitations with body occlusions and non-frontal tracking. Meanwhile, new human pose estimation methods have been actively developed, and a popular open-source technology is OpenPose. This study aims to propose the OpenPose-based system for computing joint angles and RULA/REBA scores and validate against the reference motion capture system, and compare its performance to the Kinect-based system. Recordings of 10 participants performing 12 experimental tasks under different conditions: with/without body occlusions and tracked from frontal/non-frontal views were analyzed. OpenPose showed good performance under all task conditions, whereas Kinect performed significantly worse than OpenPose especially at cases with body occlusions or non-frontal tracking. The findings suggested that OpenPose could be a promising technology to measure joint angles and conduct semi-automatic ergonomic postural assessments in the real workspace where the conditions are often non-ideal. • This study proposes RULA/REBA ergonomic postural assessments using OpenPose. • Joint angles and RULA/REBA scores from OpenPose were validated against reference. • OpenPose-based ergonomic assessments were robust to non-ideal task conditions. • Kinect-based assessments were less accurate at non-frontal or occluded conditions. • OpenPose is promising for ergonomic postural assessments in the real workspace.