Abstract
Eliminating awkward and stressful working postures through the ergonomics workplace design is important in preventing work-related musculoskeletal disorders. However, effective design tools are currently lacking. Different postural analysis tools have been proposed to help evaluate workplaces in the level of postural stresses experienced by the workers, but they are not capable of supporting the proactive ergonomics in design. In an effort to address the problem, this study presents a novel memory-based workplace evaluation (MBWE) model. When given an input scenario expressed in terms of the worker anthropometric characteristics, the task requirement, and the geometric descriptions of the to-be-evaluated workplace design, the model computes the range of feasible working postures for the scenario, determines their postural stress levels, and presents a report on the overall postural risk level of the input scenario. The MBWE model combines the memory-based posture planning (MBPP) model and the Ovako working posture analysis (OWAS) method.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.