Ideas are born in our visionaries' minds, converted into projects and brought to market maturity in our products. Realizing these ideas is where our true competence lies - and we have committed ourselves to pioneering a path to the future.

The Musculo-skeletal Injury Reduction Tools for Health and safety (MIRTH) project, sponsored by the European Union, is aimed at reducing the high amount of damage wreaked on the economy (and on its human sufferers) by muscle skeleton illnesses caused by wrongly designed workplaces.

Using existing ergonomic methods and tools and improving these methods to then apply them to workplace design will reduce these statistics.

MIRTH tools will also be integrated into the RAMSIS human model. User training for engineers and university/health/security representatives will provide solid support in helping the new methods to gain acceptance.

This cooperative project has been created in order to generate an architectural design for the visualization and optimization of production processes within two years. The objective is to create a comprehensive portal, which will integrate and analyze a wide range of data from heterogeneous inspection systems. This platform can thus be used in all industrial sectors in which the highest demands are placed on outer surface manufacture - like the automotive industry for instance, or in plastic processing sectors.

Sponsored by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), BRIDGE.IT will build on the knowledge gained from the OPAQ project.

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OPAQ (optimization of product automation by means of optical inspection systems for the detection of "invisible" defects) is funded by the german ministry for research and development (BMBF) and contributes to the action field: " application of optical technologies and image processing in production" of the 5.th call, published Dec 15th 2000 within the framework: "Research for tomorrow´s production".

Surface inspection is gaining in importance in the light of the current "no faults" product policy. The OPAQ project, founded October 2001, is developing a new technology in order to discover defects as small as 40 micrometers on the surface of 3D panels during forming operations. Making quality transparent at the boundaries of successive production steps reduces both, the number of defects that slip through quality control and spiraling additional costs.

The aim of the EC-sponsored project REAL MAN is to develop a movement and comfort model for human simulation. To this end, multi-model simulation methods and tools will be utilized on the human models. The consortium of this 3-year project consists of research institutes, system developers and industrial representatives of the automobile sector and the aircraft and space travel sectors.

The ECN is a network comprised of research institutes and system/service providers. It supports companies on projects involving ergonomics. The emphasis is on product and workplace design, whereby the network also consolidates the 'method' side of providing services and the utilization of simulation tools. This association of highly competent partners provides project-related consultancy services, solutions and training. The ECN has been created in the form of an Internet platform.

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