Exploring age-related phenomena in VR-based teleoperations: a human-centered perspective for industry 5.0

The increasingly aging workforce is bringing particular attention to senior individuals in production sectors. While the interest in Virtual Reality (VR) applications for industrial robotics grows, the question of whether and how senior workers can withstand VR-based repetitive tasks arises. We here aimed to answer such questions by systematically assessing young and senior users' experiential, behavioural, and cognitive factors during simulated robotic teleoperations in VR. Two control systems for VR telerobotics, button- and action-based controls, were employed. Human performance, vigilance, and workload were measured through self-reports and a VR-integrated eye-tracker. Additionally, age-dependent differences in individual cultural and experiential factors were explored via self-report measures. Despite being slower and experiencing increased fatigue under specific conditions, as suggested by the eye-tracking measures, senior users demonstrated comparable precision in operating the robotic arm to their younger counterparts. Notably, both age groups reported similar levels of perceived fatigue. The paper provides an in-depth analysis of the advantages and challenges of adopting advanced telerobotics control systems across different age groups, consistently emphasising the human-centered dimension.