Automated Ergonomic Risk Assessment of Wheelchair Users During Cabinet Interaction Using Vision-Based 3D Pose Estimation.

Advanced sensor signal analysis is increasingly important for intelligent health management in human-centered environments, where continuous perception and real-time interpretation of motion-related signals are essential for safe and adaptive assistance. In this study, we propose a vision-based sensor signal analysis framework for automated ergonomic risk assessment of wheelchair users during cabinet interaction. The proposed framework integrates YOLOv11 for human detection, MHFormer for monocular 3D pose reconstruction, and a fuzzy logic-enhanced RULA model for continuous ergonomic risk quantification from video-derived motion signals. To support model development and evaluation, we constructed a dedicated wheelchair cabinet-operation dataset comprising 30 participants, including 14 experienced wheelchair users and 16 trained simulation participants, across five representative cabinet-operation scenarios. The raw dataset contained approximately 5 h of RGB video and about 150,000 original frames. To reduce redundancy caused by highly similar consecutive frames and to mitigate overfitting risk, representative frames were sampled from the continuous video sequences, resulting in 10,000 images for annotation and model development. Based on the proposed framework, raw visual sensor signals are transformed into temporally continuous kinematic representations and ergonomic risk scores, enabling non-contact and real-time health-state interpretation in assistive living environments. The proposed method achieved an average joint-angle estimation RMSE of 7.5°, representing an approximately 60% reduction compared with a Kinect v2-based motion capture baseline (18.6°), which is widely used for low-cost ergonomic evaluation. In benchmark evaluation, the proposed method achieved 84% risk-classification accuracy with a Cohen's kappa of 0.66, outperforming representative baseline approaches. The results further indicated that low revolving-door and low-drawer operations were associated with higher and more sustained ergonomic risk exposure than sliding-door interaction. These findings demonstrate that vision-based sensor signal analysis can provide an effective solution for intelligent health management, ergonomic monitoring, and perception-driven assessment in accessible and assistive autonomous living systems.