It is a true pleasure and honor to collaborate with such an exceptional team on this project, which I believe holds great potential to bring transformative improvements to worker safety. I would like to express my deep gratitude to our collaborators: Aditi Roy from Siemens, and Swapan Sanjanwala and Akanksh Shetty from Innovative Numerics. A special thanks goes to our industrial partners— Rebecca Greer from thyssenkrupp BILSTEIN, Stephen Bartos, PhD from Worthington Steel, and Maxim Serezhin from Standard Power—for allowing us to collect data and use their sites for demonstrations. I look forward to continuing to work with this highly capable group which includes over a dozen very talented graduate students from three departments and two colleges at University of Cincinnati. Thank you for your support - Dean John Weidner, Dr. Ying Sun, Dr. Gautam Pillay, Dr. Patrick A. Limbach, Dr. Jennifer Krivickas, Dr. Mohsen Rezayat, Art Koehler, Fabian Schmahl.
Congratulations to MME faculty member and principal investigator Dr. Manish Kumar, his University of Cincinnati - College of Engineering and Applied Science co-investigators Dr. Sam Anand (MME) and Dr. Kelly Cohen (AEEM), and his University of Cincinnati College of Medicine co-investigators Dr. Amit Bhattacharya and Dr. M.B. Rao for recently receiving a $1.3 million grant from the Ohio Bureau of Workers Compensation (OBWC) to develop technologies to improve the safety of workers in the manufacturing and logistics industry! Dr. Kumar and his large, multidisciplinary team are developing human digital twin technology that uses a non-wearable camera-based method to carry out pose estimation, activity recognition, and motion prediction to provide ergonomic and safety alerts to workers and supervisors in real-time. Their work capitalizes on recent developments in generative artificial intelligence (AI) techniques for motion prediction and textual ergonomic characterization of workers’ activities. This project, which includes industrial partners Siemens Technology, Innovative Numerics, Worthington Industries, thyssenkrup BILSTEIN, and Standard Power, is the result of the collaborative efforts at UC's Industry 4.0/5.0 Institute, co-directed by Dr. Kumar and Dr. Anand.