For sports people and industrial workers, correct physical motion of the body is needed to optimise performance and avoid injury. Measuring motion and monitoring the body’s feedback usually means intrusive sensors or uncomfortable wearables that may not have the resilience for a full day’s work.
Combining computer vision technology with physics-based biomechanical models, Ergomechanic is an effective, easy-to-use solution for identifying risky movement, optimising outcomes for sports and for workplace safety.
Technology
Ergomechanic is a system that measures how your body moves and is loaded during work, sports, or lifestyle activities. It uses any type of camera as a 3D movement sensor and provides feedback on the amount of load your body has experienced in a day or over a week.
It does not record anything else about you, your appearance, or the nature of your activities. Our evidence-based system helps you understand:
- which parts of your daily activities could lead to injury in the long term
- how you could perform better physically
- how your environment could be improved to reduce injury risk.
Learn more about the technology
Applications
Ergomechanic can be used in any environment to assess movement, indoors or outdoors. This could be for sports, workplace health and safety (from manual handling to desk-based work), physiotherapy and orthopaedic assessment, or movement degeneration and falls for the elderly. We’re currently developing our technology in a laboratory setting where there is a lot of repeated fine movement, and in industrial environments where overhead work and difficult-to-access workspaces are common.
Real-world application
A virtual model of an Olympic swimmer was used to assess a coach’s proposed changes to the swimmer’s technique. Changes to swimming speed were assessed without disrupting training.
Diving Australia also had the opportunity to experiment with our tool to help optimise the diving technique of Olympic synchronised diving athletes. Coaches and athletes can trial technique alterations for improved scores without compromising performance or safety.
Ergomechanic has been used to evaluate workstation design for workers with repetitive tasks. Movement types and equipment layout that unnecessarily put higher loads on the body were automatically identified. Managers and workplace safety practitioners were then alerted to mitigate the risks.
Intellectual property
We have developed significant know-how in biomechanics and computer vision techniques. We have validated this camera-based technology against gold standard measurement practices.
Ergomechanic can be configured to use any type of camera and is built on top of CSIRO’s Workspace software platform. It is subject to license and comprises propriety and opensource software codebases. It can be customised to use a range of open source or protected computer vision libraries as required for any application.