Friday Five

Friday Five – 9/13/19

Quin Bond, CEAS IIILeave a comment

This is a slightly different Friday Five.  I’m not going to post a check of what is new in the research in the areas of ergonomics and safety.  This week will be a quick recap of what I think were five important takeaways from the conference that I attended yesterday – “Everything You Wanted To Know About New Jersey Workers Compensation” which was hosted by John Geaney from Capehart Scatchard and Millenium Seminars.   If  you aren’t following John’s blog on workers compensation, you should be.

“Recovery on the job” – Trudy Mandia from AtlantiCare

I tweeted about this yesterday.  I hate the term “light duty”.  So many people get wrapped up with the word light with a lot getting it confused with the term “light work” which is considered to be a job with an occasional lift, push, pull, carry demand of 20 pounds.  Everyone tends to get wrapped up on the restrictions on an individual when they hear “light duty”.  Over the years, I have been on a mission to reframe the term as modified duty which is not so wrapped up in the restrictions on demands.  But, I love the term that Trudy talked about from AtlantiCare’s standpoint.  They no longer use the term light duty and have replaced it with “Recovery on the job” with the focus being on an individual’s current abilities and not focusing on what they can not currently do.

“Make sure that it isn’t boxes just being clicked”

Dr. Dwyer from Premier Orthopedics mentioned the reminder that with so many medical records being generated by different EMR packages, sometimes practitioners can end up clicking through.  Make sure that the physicians and therapists are being accurate when they are completing medical records in an EMR system and that they are also indicating both active and passive range of motion of the injured body part at all visits.

“Make sure that your employees know how long light duty will last”

This topic came up across multiple discussions through out the day because it is that important.  This is something that we tell clients that we meet with when we are talking about both regular job descriptions and tasks that might be available for modified duty.  Leaving an employee in a modified duty position for an indeterminate length makes some employees want to remain in that position for the remainder of their employment and also makes it easy to argue that the “modified duty position” is essential if an employee is left in that position for a prolonged duration of time.

“Job Descriptions”

Another topic that was mentioned several times because as John said yesterday, good job descriptions are the building block for creating a workers compensation program.  I’ve written about customized job descriptions multiple times on this blog, but members of yesterday’s panels provided reminders that good, solid, accurate job descriptions allow:

  • The physicians and physical therapists do their jobs to get the injured employee back to the essential demands of the position.
  • Allow physicians, employers, and case managers to possibly get an injured employee on modified duty when it becomes appropriate and helps to allow for progression of modified duty over the treatment timeline
  • Is necessary for having an effective interactive dialogue when the issues of accommodations comes up.
  • Need to accurately reflect current essential postural and physical tasks that are performed.

“Communication”

The issue of communication came up in several panel discussions during the day.  Communication between the employer, the case manager, the physician, the physical therapist, and the employee is key in moving towards a successful end state for an injury claim.

  • I was glad to hear that having a bilingual staff member to help with the communications process with injured workers at the Tropicana has made a big improvement in their program.  I know that in the provision of FCEs, we have been grateful when a translator has been provided if a claimant does not speak English but provision of a translator is not a common occurence.  Having a translator can make things go much easier and quicker when everyone is on the same page.
  • Make sure that you communicate your modified duty program guidelines to your injured employee when it is offered and put it in writing.  This helps to make sure that everyone is on the same page.

This is just a small sampling of some of the important topics that were discussed during the course of the day.  These one day conferences are a great opportunity to learn from the speakers, the attendees as they ask questions/make comments, and during the breaks to learn from the vendors and the attendees.

atlantic-city-beach-patrol-boat-82-quin-bond

(A photo I took during a previous conference in Atlantic City but yesterday’s weather conditions were similar)

 

 

Friday Five – 8/2/19

Quin Bond, CEAS IIILeave a comment

The Friday Five is a set of five links that I have come across this week that pertain to ergonomics, occupational health, safety, human performance, or human factors.  For whatever reason, I found them interesting, but they are provided with minimal or no commentary and are not meant to be endorsement for a given product or research paper.

Diane Gyi et al. have created a new anthropometry data set for plus sized workers.  With increasing obesity levels, this new dataset is very important as many of the original data sets  that were utilized were based on measurements of military personnel.  A course from The Back School on ergonomics for plus sized workers was a good reminder for me that this category requires some different ergonomic considerations because there are some different biomechanical needs when setting up or correcting workstations.  It was also a good reminder that this category is not necessarily about obesity – the plus sized worker category includes anyone that is outside of the normative data sets, regardless of the reason why they fall outside of the normative data.  (When I originally took the course, it reminded me of The Incredibles when Bob tries to become a non-super hero, stuffing himself into the small car or into his cubicle at work).

Dominique Larouche et al. look at the issue of safe handling techniques for paramedics when transferring patients from stair chairs to stretchers.  One of the interesting points is that they believe that training needs to be oriented more towards the ability to adapt work techniques based on the environment and on the work teammates.

Joshua Zheng Rui Ting et al. investigated the effect of an ergonomics/exercise intervention compared to an ergonomics/health promotion intervention on workability levels in the office worker population.   For the general population, there was no significant difference in results.  But for a subgroup of office workers who reported neck pain (greater than 3/10 at start of study), the ergonomics and exercise intervention group demonstrated trending improvements in workability when compared to the ergonomics/health promotion group, if they completed at least 70% of the exercise sessions.

Peter Love et al. dealt with the difficulties in establishing operational guidelines for construction safety when the information on injuries is not readily available to use to set best practice guidelines.

Kaitlin Gallagher et al. noted that walking breaks can help to reduce low back pain that is induced by prolonged standing.   Walking and moving is something that I have been an advocate of for a long time.  Walking is not only great to break up prolonged postures (sitting or standing) but the overall movement is helpful for preventing other health issues as well.

 

Friday Five -7/26/19

Quin Bond, CEAS IIILeave a comment

 

The Friday Five is a set of five links that I have come across this week that pertain to ergonomics, occupational health, safety, human performance, or human factors.  For whatever reason, I found them interesting, but they are provided with minimal or no commentary and are not meant to be endorsement for a given product or research paper.

Jodi Oakman et al. performed a 6 year study looking at issues of workability and musculoskeletal pain in a Finnish food industry company. They looked at the relationship between workability and musculoskeletal pain, physical work conditions, and psychosocial work conditions as well as what interventions made changes to workability levels. (Of note, this study was interesting to me as I have been working with an employer that has performed a musculoskeletal discomfort survey with its employees to help to identify tasks that may be contributing to musculoskeletal discomfort.)

A study by Sherry Hassam et al. looked at a 24 month intervention using the “Walking Works Wonders” program to evaluate changes to office based participants in a standard walking program and a tailored intervention program when compared to a control group.  While both exercise groups demonstrated improvements in measures of well being and resting heart rate, those in the tailored intervention demonstrated additional improvements in BMI measures and waist circumference.

A companion study to the above walking intervention study by Kazi et al. notes that sitting at work for the 1120 participants in the study accounted for nearly 60% of their daily sitting time and that those is sales and customer service positions have higher BMI and poorer health than those in other employment sectors.

Jesse Jacobs et al. looked at employee attitudes towards acceptance of wearable devices in the workplace.  They found that employers who want to implement wearables “should (a) focus its use on improving workplace safety, (b) advance a positive safety climate, (c) ensure sufficient evidence to support employees’ beliefs that the wearable will meet its objective, and (d) involve and inform employees in the process of selecting and implementing wearable technology.”

Xavier Robert-Lachaine et al. looked at the feasibility of using magnetic and inertial measurement units for analyzing performance of manual material handling tasks.  They found that while visualization of the data collected for the head, arms, and legs did not demonstrate significant visual difference from data collected visually by observers, there was a greater difference between visualization of data and observer’s evaluation of trunk movement.  They found that using these units can be acceptable, visual verification of the data is still important to ensure validity as magnetic disturbances can increase measurement error and affect collected data.

Friday Five – 4/13/18

Quin Bond, CEAS IIILeave a comment

The Friday Five is a set of five links that I have come across this week that pertain to ergonomics, occupational health, safety, human performance, or human factors.  For whatever reason, I found them interesting, but they are provided with minimal or no commentary and are not meant to be endorsement for a given product or research paper.

The topic this week is going to be a little bit different – ergonomics and space.  I noticed that Mike Massimino had posted on Twitter yesterday (@AstroMike) that it was #InternationalDayOfHumanSpaceFlight.  When I read his biography, one of the things that struck me from an ergonomics standpoint was the section about the attempts to automate the final Hubble repairs but in the end, it needed to be performed by human astronauts – and they needed to modify/create tools to get it done.  So, in honor of @AstroMike and all of the other astronauts who have done work in space, here is the Friday Five.

Due to the fact that we perform Post-Offer Physical Abilities testing at Biokinetics, this first study is interesting to me.  Taylor et al. looked at 8 NASA astronauts to look at performance on a series of tasks to determine whether task performance can be predicted when in a weighted suit.

Hackney et al.  look at the astronaut as an athlete (it’s an apt comparison, similar to the industrial athlete that we talk about within the occupational/industrial health realm) and what can be done to counter the decline of musculoskeletal strength and endurance during space flight to ensure that crew safety and mission success are not negatively impacted by astronaut performance.

Walters and Webb used a NASA Task Load Index to look at factors such as physical demands and effort for personnel involved in robotic surgery.  The goals were to determine appropriate staffing levels based on workload to maintain efficiency, team satisfaction, and patient satisfaction.

Strauss et al. reviewed data from extravehicular mobility training to look at the injuries and complaints that occurred during training at the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory when astronauts were training in space suits to perform tasks and use the data to determine the best multidisciplinary approach to resolve these issues.

Petersen et al.  investigated a new testing battery to look at fitness of astronaut candidates for the European Space Agency.

29662686_1822044461181744_1514154722614260250_o

This is a shot of the Space Shuttle Discovery at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center of the National Air and Space Museum that I took on March 30, 2018.  Back in 2001, I was lucky enough to get to spend a short period of time in one of the mock-up shuttles at Johnson Space Center that was used for training the astronauts.  It still amazes me that the astronauts could spend the time in orbit and perform science missions in the crew space which wasn’t very large.  We were also able to watch some of the training that was going on in the NBL from one of the control rooms.  I’d like to think that the training we witnessed was part of the data set for the paper by Strauss.

 

 

Friday Five – 4/6/18

Quin Bond, CEAS IIILeave a comment

It’s been a while, but I am going to get this started back up with a new edition of the Friday Five.

The Friday Five is a set of five links that I have come across this week that pertain to ergonomics, occupational health, safety, human performance, or human factors.  For whatever reason, I found them interesting, but they are provided with minimal or no commentary and are not meant to be endorsement for a given product or research paper.

Kesler et al.  looked at the impact of the size of SCBA units (the self-contained air packs that firefighters wear) as well as fatigue (based on different bouts of work-recovery) on the gait of firefighters.  As can be imagined, there are changes based on both parameters. A second study with similar parameters by Kesler looked at the impact on balance.  A third study by Kesler’s team looked at physiological stress and work output – as can be imagined, the baseline fitness of the individual firefighters has an impact on these values.

Putting ergonomics programs into place within companies has always been a tricky intervention.  Visser et al. compare participatory ergonomics programs of a face-to-face nature and e-guidance programs to see how well they work.  There are some interesting findings.

Michel et al. looked at the collaboration in the return to work process in French occupational centers in dealing with patients who had chronic low back pain.  There are some interesting aspects to the communication between the different participants in the rehab process.

Hegewald et al. take a look at the data on technical devices to reduce musculoskeletal injuries during patient handling.  The overall finding is very interesting.

As we have had the discussion with some surgeons who are located in our building, the review by Stucky et al. on complaints of surgeons of work related pain and musculoskeletal complaints and surgical ergonomics is very interesting.  Of note, operating exacerbated complaints in 61% of the surgeons but only 29% sought medical treatment.

 

 

Friday Five – 6/9/17

Quin Bond, CEAS IIILeave a comment

The Friday Five is a set of five links that I have come across this week that pertain to ergonomics, occupational health, safety, human performance, or human factors.  For whatever reason, I found them interesting, but they are provided with minimal or no commentary and are not meant to be endorsement for a given product or research paper.
These links were generated during a PubMed search on the terms: ergonomics workplace and ergonomics musculoskeletal

Love et al.  look into the ergonomic issues associated with home health care workers and what can be done to reduce the risk of injury.

Ceshi et al. examine the impact of exhaustion, workplace demands, and workplace resources affect decision making and the subsequent impact on performance.

Pandalia et al.  investigate usage of a Composite Lifting Index to assess risk of low back pain in material handling tasks.

Chen et al. looked at the psychophysical limits on lifting a weighted box between younger and older female workers.  Women between the ages of 50 and 63 years old chose weights that were approximately 24% less than the younger co-hort (between 20 and 32 years old).

Antonucci et al. examined the effect of drill bit wear on vibration and task performance.  Drill bit wear creates an increase in the vibration of the drill and increases time to complete task performance.  Antonucci et al. recommend instituting drill bit replacement protocls for when drill bits become worn.

 

 

Friday Five – 4/28/17

Quin Bond, CEAS IIILeave a comment

The Friday Five is a set of five links that I have come across this week that pertain to ergonomics, occupational health, safety, human performance, or human factors.  For whatever reason, I found them interesting, but they are provided with minimal or no commentary and are not meant to be endorsement for a given product or research paper.

These links were generated during a PubMed search on the terms: applied ergonomics

Lee et al. investigated the position of two different wearable sensor systems on the posture of construction workers while performing assigned tasks in a laboratory.  As those who have worked with motion capture devices know, placement of these sensors is everything in terms of collected data.

He et al. look at using Google Glass to monitor eye blinking in drivers to determine signs of drowsiness.  Distracted driving is something that we’ve hit upon in other posts.  Technology such as this may be able to go along way in helping drivers to recognize when they are too fatigued to drive safely.

Schmidt et al. investigated a different way of dealing with fatigue during long drives through the use of a cooling device to help improve alertness.

Armstrong et al. reviewed the impact of two paramedic services transitioning to a powered stretcher to help reduce injuries related to patient transport.  This appears to be a cost-effective solution with a reduction in injuries during patient transport.

Hlavenka et al. investigated the effect of neck posture during lifting tasks on both lumbar spine posture and activation of trunk musculature.  They indicate that a retracted neck posture may help to lower the risk of pain and injury during lifting tasks.

 

Friday Five 4/21/17

Quin Bond, CEAS IIILeave a comment

The Friday Five is a set of five links that I have come across this week that pertain to ergonomics, occupational health, safety, human performance, or human factors.  For whatever reason, I found them interesting, but they are provided with minimal or no commentary and are not meant to be endorsement for a given product or research paper.

These links were generated during a PubMed search on the terms: ergonomics and obesity and using the new relevance button.

Cavuato and Nussbaum examined the effects of age and obesity on the performance of upper extremity activities.  They noted impairments in task performance due to fatigue, loss of strength, and discomfort during task performance related to obesity but not related to age.

Koepp et al. reviewed injury data from the Idaho National Laboratory which belongs to the Department of Energy.   In reviewing six years worth of injury data, 51% of those involved in slip, trip, and fall injuries were obese based on BMI values with a mean BMI of 31+/- 6.   This is similar to data from Ren et al. that looked at injuries in Texas which found a significant association between higher BMI levels and injuries from falls in an over 45 population.

DePaula et al.  looked into the relationship of loaded school backpacks and students (aged 10-19).  As 53 of the 339 students were considered to be obese, they provide the reminder that when looking at group data when generating percentage of body weight load for backpacks, the anthropometric breakdown for those in the sample group needs to be looked at.

Lerner et al. looked at a new marker set for collection of kinematic and kinetic data for obese subjects during gait testing.  The new obesity specific marker set was compared against a modified Helen Hayes marker set and found to have good agreement in non-obese subjects.  A significant effect was seen when comparing the marker sets with obese subjects.

Thorp et al. found that altering posture from sitting to standing every 30 minutes across the workday reduced fatigue levels and lower back pain in obese office workers while maintaining productivity.  They recommend future investigations to determine whether sustained use of adjustable height workstations affects concentration.

 

 

 

Friday Five – 4/7/17

Quin Bond, CEAS IIILeave a comment

The Friday Five is a set of five links that I have come across this week that pertain to ergonomics, occupational health, safety, human performance, or human factors.  For whatever reason, I found them interesting, but they are provided with minimal or no commentary and are not meant to be endorsement for a given product or research paper.

One of the topics in the news of late that I find to be interesting is the incorporation of new technologies into the automation of the workplace.  These articles are all current as of this week.

A Dallas, Texas based landscaping company has added 50 lawn cutting robots to its workforce with plans to add another 50 to 100 robots each month.  These Roomba style robots for the yard are rented to customers on a monthly basis.

Michael Chui, James Manyika, and Mehdi Miremadi from the McKinsey Quarterly provide a breakdown on which areas of the workforce machines are able to now replace human workers.  The article breakdown the five criteria for replacement of human workers by automation: technical feasibility, cost to automate, benefits of automation, scarcity of skilled workers to perform the task, and the acceptability of automating the position.

Adam C. Uzialko of Business News Daily provides a solid reminder that workplace automation is not solely the realm of robots performing tasks.  Some of the recently automated tasks that he discusses include the logistics associated with looking for and screening new hire candidates.

Locus Robotics has developed warehouse technology that does not replace human selectors but works alongside humans.  Human selectors patrol areas of the DHL warehouse to place requested items in the Locus Robot which roams the warehouse.  In theory, this reduces the amount of walking that human workers perform as the robot takes up that part of the task.  Locus Robotics current solution is finding the areas that allow humans and robots to complement each other rather than replace ach other as they find this to be more cost effective.

3-D printing of clothing might help to send people back to the retail stores for purchasing of clothing instead of purchasing clothing online.  Ministry of Supply is a clothing brand that is introducing custom 3-d printed clothing to its stores.  This allows for clothing that is custom fit to the end purchaser as well as generating less waste materials due to the 3-d printing method.

 

Friday Five – 3/31/17

Quin Bond, CEAS IIILeave a comment

The Friday Five is a set of five links that I have come across this week that pertain to ergonomics, occupational health, safety, human performance, or human factors.  For whatever reason, I found them interesting, but they are provided with minimal or no commentary and are not meant to be endorsement for a given product or research paper.

This week’s five are courtesy of a PubMed search on the terms: applied ergonomics

Manghisi et al. look at the use of the Kinect V2  (the newer generation of the Kinect) for performing RULA assessments to evaluate awkward postures.  Devices like the Kinect are interesting to me as they may allow for more natural evaluations of human movement in real life work settings.

Sedighi Maman et al. look at the use of wearable technologies for evaluating a data driven model for physical fatigue in the workplace.

JA Dobson et al. provide a literature review of work boot design and the impact on how workers walk.  (This is an important topic area that came up yesterday when we were in the field performing assessments for a customized job description.  The particular job has a variety of varied tasks with some that require steel toed boots.  The biggest complaint of the employees is comfort of steel toed boots for the tasks performed.)

Kang and Shin performed a study to determine the impact on accuracy and muscle activation patterns when target location is varied on computer touch screens.  This is going to be an important area for human factors and user interface professionals as touch screens become more common in the workplace.

Plamondon et al. look at the differences in how male and female workers lifting palletized loads with the same relative weight.   This study uses a similar lifting load weight to remove strength from the equation when looking at how the task is performed biomechanically.  While patterns between male and female subjects were similar, interjoint coordination differs.  Understanding of these differences can help with interventions to better reduce material handling injuries.