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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.

 

 

 

 

Friday Five – 2/17/17

Quin Bond, CEAS IIILeave a comment

Friday Five – 2/2/17 – NJ Ergonomics Blog

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.

We are now about a month in to the new administration.  Tom Muskin at Safety and Health Magazine takes a look at what might be coming down the pike with changes at OSHA.  Two interesting points are that President Trump is the first president with experience as a business person dealing with OSHA and that we may see a shift from shaming the companies who are found to be in violation to a climate of trying to assist companies to not be in violation.  There are some interesting pros and cons to that shift.

It’s still winter time out but this research paper by Rameez Rameezdeen and Abbas Elmualin in the January 2017 issue of International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health takes a look at construction site injuries during heat waves.  One of the interesting points is that new workers (less than 1 year in job) and workers over 55 years old have higher injury rates during heat waves.   This is a good time to start planning for the heat of summer and checking protocols for dealing with employee hydration and other heat related protocols.

As was mentioned in this week’s What Not To Do Wednesday, the military becomes a great place to learn lessons.  In addition to accident reviews, they do an amazing amount of research to understand current problems so that they are no longer problems in the future.  This paper by AM Kelley et al in the February 2017 issue of Aerospace Medicine and Human Performance looks at the issue of helicopter aircrews and back pain through the lens of age, gender, airframe, and more.  Only by looking at current complaints can we reduce future complaints.

This might make for one of the more interesting projects for an engineering lab.  Carolyn Summerich, PhD of Ohio State University looked at ergonomics issues affecting tattoo artists.  Not surprisingly, there are some potential musculoskeletal issues lurking in this industry.

In France, a 105 year old man not only set a record a one hour cycling record but also helped to prove that physical performance and ability can be improved at any age.  Dr. Veronique Billat and her colleagues at University of Evry-Val d’Essonne in France followed Robert Marchand’s performance and provided him with a workout program that he followed for two years (from age 103 to age 105).  In testing, they found his VO2 improved 13% and was comparable to that of a 50 year old.  This is something that is going to be revisited in the future on this site.