Comparing Tactile, Auditory, and Visual Assembly Error-Feedback for Workers with Cognitive Impairments

Abstract

More and more industrial manufacturing companies are out­ sourcing assembly tasks to sheltered work organizations where cognitively impaired workers are employed. To facilitate these assembly tasks assistive systems have been introduced to provide cognitive assistance. While previous work found that these assistive systems have a great impact on the work­ ers’ performance in giving assembly instructions, these sys­ tems are further capable of detecting errors and notifying the worker of an assembly error. However, the topic of how assembly errors are presented to cognitively impaired work­ ers has not been analyzed scientifically. In this paper, we close this gap by comparing tactile, auditory, and visual er­ ror feedback in a user study with 16 cognitively impaired workers. The results reveal that visual error feedback leads to a significantly faster assembly time compared to tactile error feedback. Further, we discuss design implications for providing error feedback for workers with cognitive impair­ ments.