In Industry 4.0 scenarios, wearable sensing allows the development of monitoring solutions for workers' risk prevention. Current approaches aim to identify the presence of a risky event, such as falls, when it has already occurred. However, there is a need to develop methods capable of identifying the presence of a risk condition in order to prevent the occurrence of the damage itself. The measurement of vital and non-vital physiological parameters enables the worker's complex state estimation to identify risk conditions preventing falls, slips and fainting, as a result of physical overexertion and heat stress exposure. This paper aims at investigating classification approaches to identify risk conditions with respect to normal physical activity by exploiting physiological measurements in different conditions of physical exertion and heat stress. Moreover, the role played in the risk identification by specific sensors and features was investigated. The obtained results evidenced that k-Nearest Neighbors is the best performing algorithm in all the experimental conditions exploiting only information coming from cardiorespiratory monitoring (mean accuracy 88.7±7.3% for the model trained with max(HR), std(RR) and std(HR)).
Keywords: fall prediction; physiological monitoring; worker risk prevention.