An Experimental Protocol for Human Stress Investigation in Manufacturing Contexts: Its Application in the NO-STRESS Project

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

 

• The study employed a human-centred approach and developed a comprehensive framework for stress analysis. Both subjective and objective measures were used to measure stress level of employees working in manufacturing settings. 
• Well-known subjective measures exit in literature for stress measurement. However, measuring stress via physiological signals (objective measures) such as heat rate, electrodermal activity, electroencephalogram, and electromyogram is missing in literature. This addition makes the study unique from others.
• The study applied a rigorous methodology.
•  Authors need to consider my comments provided on my previous review report.
• Conclusion of the study has stitched with literature. 

 Comments for improvement:

• Include a separate sub-section for limitations and future research directions.
• Scholarly highlights the theoretical and practical implications of the study.
• Minor editing of English is required. 

Minor editing of English language required 

Author Response

Please see the attachment. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The topic of stress measurements in manufacturing is highly relevant. The proposed methodology and experiments process is good, but I have a lot of concerns about it:

1) there exists a new systematic scoping review about the HRV measurement to assess the stress of workers in the industrial manufacturing environment. Please look at it

2) From the introduction I really miss a brief overview of the type of stress, like the work-content-related, long- and short-term, etc.

3) The research background section is not comprehensive. It is talking about human-centered manufacturing, but the Operator 4.0 concept is totally missing from there. I would like to suggest looking at it, you will find a lot of papers about the current enabling technologies and developments. Also, the Healthy Operator 4.0 pillar.

4) Operator or worker well-being is mentioned a lot but there is no overview of it, there are a lot of papers about the operator well-being assessment.

5) For the beginning of the second section, a short paragraph should be written to connect the subsections

6) Section 2.3 is good, but I am missing the evaluation part, what is the current state-of-the-art of the evaluation of stress?

7) In Section 3, the human-task-context taxonomy is proposed, but in Section 2, where the background is discussed, the current methods and models are not mentioned at all. Also, I am missing this part from the introduction.

8) In section 3.1, there are a lot of lists, but there is no discussion of them. Pls try to reorganize this section to make it more reader-friendly.

9) Does Figure 2 is an own developed concept? If not, pls cite the background of it.

10) Figure 3 is a good overview, but there is no description of how they evaluate these signals? How can be calculated the rates? This is the most significant problem; without a detailed process (algorithms and mathematical formulation) it is just a concept.

11) There are no detailed results to prove the applicability of the proposed method. Section 4.3 does not provide anything about the measured values.

Finally, the stress evaluation is more complex and the measurement of it is not simple. There are a lot of things that should be considered during the assessment (like personal life) The paper proposed a promising method for the measurements, but there is nothing about the evaluation. Yes, we can measure the physiological signals with the mentioned sensors, and we can make a lot of questionnaires. But the main challenge is how can we discover the stress factors from this data?

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

In the material sent for evaluation, the authors raised issues related to measuring employee stress, i.e. a critical area from the point of view of the functioning of Industry 5.0. Unfortunately, despite reading the text several times, I cannot say the article's purpose, what conclusions are drawn from it, and where any experimental research results are. I'm sorry, but in my opinion, the material is very theoretical and not suitable for publication in a journal. To make this possible, it is necessary to supplement the material with the results of experimental research and to conduct a possible comparative analysis of the results obtained. In addition, I am asking the authors to answer/clarify the following issues:

Please indicate the source of Figure 2. The reviewer disagrees with the situation marked in the figure as C1. The authors say low task difficulty and low operator skills are optimal situations! Last year, I led a team investigating the stress levels of baggage control operators at airports (using methods similar to the authors') - the conclusions were precisely the opposite. The low skill of the operator always caused him great stress - regardless of the task's difficulty! Please explain or support the C1 situation with some experimental results.

Section 4.1.6 - incomprehensible to the reader. How should we understand usability problems (line 559 - what is their definition, what is mentioned usability)? No test results support the statements in lines 564 - 570!

Section 4.2.6 - did the participants see the full Likert scale when completing the questionnaire: providing only linguistic descriptions of the extreme values of the scale very often leads to completely unreliable answers!

Section 6 - Conclusions

Lines 990 - 993: A notable result of this research is identifying critical factors that affect employee performance and stress levels. In addition, the article provides a comprehensive overview of various indicators and tools related to stress assessment. This model offers a detailed understanding of the complex relationship between work-related stress and its impact on employees.

Please indicate the listed critical factors - unfortunately, I did not find research results in my work that would give me the right to formulate such conclusions!

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

I would like to thank you the author to consider most of my previous comments. The manuscript is improved a lot based on your work. I read the manuscript carefully and I am missing a correct answer and an additional part for my previous concern:

"10) Figure 3 is a good overview, but there is no description of how they evaluate these signals? How can be calculated the rates? This is the most significant problem; without a detailed process (algorithms and mathematical formulation) it is just a concept."

I understood you do not have any quantitative results or even a sufficient evaluation of the proposed novel experimental protocol, but it would be necessary to extend the theoretical evaluation part.

Just a minor thing: Please integrate Subsections 2.2 and 2.3

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

I maintain the opinion expressed that the presented material is very theoretical. I understand that, at this stage, the authors do not want to share detailed results before publishing and evaluating the official study report. The subject matter is too interesting to be limited to theoretical considerations only. Therefore, I look forward to continuing to present the results in subsequent works. Considering the work done by the team and the detailed reference to the questions I asked and the suggestions made, I propose to accept the article for publication in the journal.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer #3,

We sincerely appreciate your understanding of our current approach, which focuses on presenting the theoretical foundation of our work while withholding detailed results. our support and encouragement to present the results in subsequent works are inspiring, and we are committed to sharing the empirical findings derived from the study in future publications. Based on your comprehensive assessment and the points you've highlighted; we are grateful for your proposal to accept the article for publication in the journal.

Round 3

Reviewer 2 Report

Authors handle all of my concerns it is ready to publish