Appropriate design and modification of industrial tasks must consider the matching of human physical abilities with task requirements. This paper describes the Available Motions Inventory (AMI) as a testing and evaluation system for measuring human physical ability based on components of manual industrial tasks. Using a microcomputer, one can transform the AMI scores (71 for each hand) into raw scores, ability scores, motion class scores, and performance prediction indices. Examples of task modification strategies using the design-oriented scoring of AMI are illustrated. Also, the reliability of the AMI testing system was evaluated using a multivariate canonical correlation analysis. A high test-retest reliability of 0.85 was obtained.
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