Virginia Tech
    • Log in
    View Item 
    •   VTechWorks Home
    • ETDs: Virginia Tech Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    • Doctoral Dissertations
    • View Item
    •   VTechWorks Home
    • ETDs: Virginia Tech Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    • Doctoral Dissertations
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    Development and Evaluation of Methods to Assess Physical Exposures in the Workplace

    Thumbnail
    View/Open
    Kim_S_D_2012.pdf (2.140Mb)
    Downloads: 2847
    Date
    2012-12-06
    Author
    Kim, Sun Wook
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    Abstract
    Work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WSMDs) are an important health concern in the workplace.  Accurately quantifying the level of physical exposures (i.e., kinematics and kinetics) is essential for risk assessments, developing and/or testing interventions, and improving estimates of exposure-response relationships.  Such exposures ideally should be quantified in situ, while workers interact with the actual work environment to complete their tasks.  However, in practice, relatively crude and/or time-consuming methods are often used, including self-reports, observational methods, and simple instrumentation, since directly assessing physical exposures is challenging in the workplace, and typically resource prohibitive. Inertial motion capture (IMC) and in-shoe pressure measurement (IPM) systems are emerging wearable technologies, and they can, respectively, facilitate monitoring of body kinematics and external forces on the body in the workplace.  Thus, this research examined the potential of such technologies in exposure assessments, and evaluated them in comparison to mature laboratory systems (i.e., optical motion capture system and force platform) or direct observation.  Performance of an IMC system was evaluated during several manual material handling (MMH) tasks, in terms of estimated body kinematics and kinetics at selected body parts.  A practical issue, regarding calibrating the IPM system in the field, was addressed by defining an ad hoc global coordinate system using a force platform.  Several regression models were developed for estimating center-of-pressure location and ground reaction forces.  Given that outputs from the IMC and the IPM systems are numerically fine-grained, but generally lack contextual information about a given job, task classification approaches were explored to automatically identify task types and their time proportions in a job. Overall, the outcomes from these studies demonstrated the potential of the IMC and the IPM systems for measuring physical exposures in the workplace.  However, estimation of physical exposures using these systems requires further improvements in some cases.  This research provided groundwork for future rapid and direct assessments of physical exposures in the workplace, and which needs to be expanded and validated in future efforts.
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/10919/19196
    Collections
    • Doctoral Dissertations [16363]

    If you believe that any material in VTechWorks should be removed, please see our policy and procedure for Requesting that Material be Amended or Removed. All takedown requests will be promptly acknowledged and investigated.

    Virginia Tech | University Libraries | Contact Us
     

     

    VTechWorks

    AboutPoliciesHelp

    Browse

    All of VTechWorksCommunities & CollectionsBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsThis CollectionBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjects

    My Account

    Log inRegister

    Statistics

    View Usage Statistics

    If you believe that any material in VTechWorks should be removed, please see our policy and procedure for Requesting that Material be Amended or Removed. All takedown requests will be promptly acknowledged and investigated.

    Virginia Tech | University Libraries | Contact Us