Industrial Playgrounds. How Gamification Helps to Enrich Work for Elderly or Impaired Persons in Production Oliver Korn University of Applied Sciences Esslingen, Kanalstr. 33, 73728 Esslingen, Germany oliver.korn@hs-esslingen.de ABSTRACT This paper introduces an approach for implementing motivating mechanics from game design to production environments by integrating them in a new kind of computer-based assistive system. This process can be called “gamification”. By using motion recognition, the work processes becomes transparent and can be visualized in real-time. This allows representing them as bricks in a “production game” which resembles the classic game Tetris. The aim is to achieve and sustain a mental state called “flow” resulting in increased motivation and better performance. Although the approach presented here primarily focuses on elderly and impaired workers, the enhanced assistive system or “wizard” can principally enrich work in every production environment. Keywords Augmented Reality; User-Centered Design; Assistive technology; Human Computer Interaction (HCI); Human Machine Interaction (HMI); Elderly; Gamification ACM Classification Keywords H.1.2 [User/Machine Systems]: Human factors, Human information processing, Software Psychology; H.5.1 [Multimedia Information Systems] Artificial, augmented, and virtual realities; H.5.2 [User Interfaces]: User-centered design; H5.m [Miscellaneous]: HCI; I.2.1 [Applications and Expert Systems] Games, Industrial automation; I.2.10 [Vision and Scene Understanding]: Motion; K.4.2 [Social Issues]: Assistive technologies for persons with disabilities INTRODUCTION The growing demand for highly individualized products promotes the return of human assembly work in production. At the same time the work of impaired and elderly persons in production environments becomes increasingly important [1]. In our research we have studied the requirements for assistive systems that address the needs of these two groups more aptly. We discovered three major issues that need to be addressed: (i) current systems have been focused primarily on the control of results, while new systems need to become more process-oriented (ii) user interfaces have to be simplified and support natural interaction (iii) mechanisms that increase motivation have to be integrated. Within this larger framework, the work presented here focuses on the gamification approach. Other aspects of this new kind of assistive system in production environments (ASiPE) like motion detection and in-situ projection will be described in future work. MOTIVATION The ASiPE addresses two groups: Firstly elderly workers and secondly impaired or disabled workers. The motivation for focusing on these groups, as well as general developments in production supporting their growing importance, will be briefly described. While the percentage of older employees grows in European countries, the employment rate in the population aged 55 to 64 years was 41.7% in 2003. The European Union has set a target rate at 50% by 2013 for the EU15 countries, implying an increase of 8.3% within 10 years [2: 362]. The aim of all EU countries is the prolongation of working lifetime and thus more employees working in older age. While the elderly often excel in knowledge, work expertise and commitment [3], it has been established 40 years ago that they also suffer from a gradual reduction of short term memory [4]. This results in a decrease of learning abilities [5] and an increase of human errors in manual production. As a consequence elderly workers retire more early than they had to and often more early than they want to [6]. The establishment of motivating process- oriented assistive systems in the workplace is an efficient way to meet this demographic challenge. The market for manual production work with impaired or disabled persons becomes increasingly important. This is mainly due to two reasons: (i) Many European countries oblige companies to employ a certain percentage of disabled and impaired employees. This obligation can be met by contracting “sheltered work” organizations which focus on providing work conditions for them. (ii) The increased cost and time requirements for transport when outsourcing production processes make lean production with little storage capacity more difficult, so reasonably priced regional alternatives become more attractive. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. EICS’12, June 25–26, 2012, Copenhagen, Denmark. Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1168-7/12/06...$10.00.