Stop helping me - I'm bored!: why assembly assistance needs to be adaptive.

ABSTRACTWith the demographic change and a generally increasing product complexity, there is a growing demand for assistance technology to cognitively support workers during industrial production processes. Many approaches including head-mounted displays, smart gloves, or in-situ projections have been suggested to provide cognitive support for the workers. Recently, research focused on improving the cognitive feedback by using activity recognition to make it context-aware. Thereby an assistance technology is able to detect work steps and provide additional feedback in case the worker makes mistakes. However, when designing feedback for a rather monotonous task, such as product assembly, it should be designed in a way it does neither over-challenge nor under-challenge the worker. In this paper, we sketch out requirements for providing cognitive assistance at the workplace that can adapt to the worker's needs in real-time. Further, we discuss challenges and provide design suggestions.