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.