Application areas for human-centered assistive systems

With the advances of technology, intelligent assistive systems that adapt to individual humans will become feasible. However, application areas of such systems are rarely discussed within the Industry 4.0 community. Most assistive systems that have been presented have been developed for specific task, such as assembly support or warehouse picking, but there might be a huge uncovered design space to be explored. With this work, we want to step back from existing systems and analyze the design opportunities of assistive systems especially for small and medium-size enterprises (SME). To achieve this goal we conducted a study in four SME, consisting of observations and interviews. Here we present our findings about the potential future application areas of human-centered assistive systems.