Abstract
Today, CTDs(Cumulative Trauma Disorders) have been one of major hazards in the US and European industries disrupting work schedules, productivity and increasing workers compensation costs. The increase in their associated costs has led companies to form committees and implement programs to address this problem. Therefore, it is important that quantitative analysis tools help identify certain industrial tasks that pose risk to workers. In this study, a technique for posture measurement is proposed to have more reliable way of data acquisition. There are three main steps. The first step is a videotaping of each types of postures. The second step is a conversion of posture information in videotape into image file using encoder. The third step is an actual measurement using three labels on each frame of the posture converted from the videotape. If you located these labels at the joints (e.g. shoulder-elbow-wrist), you would have a deviation angle for the middle joint (e.g. elbow). When you finished one posture (e.g. right elbow flexion), you would have descriptive statistics of the posture as well as individual deviation angles for each frame.
Finally, a pilot study for the reliability of this technique was conducted. The total of ten subjects was asked to measure a posture of each frame using this technique. Most correlation coefficients between real deviation angles and measured angles by subjects were over 0.7. The reliability of subjects (consistency of each subject's measurement for the same frame) was also evaluated by Cronbach Alpha. Most Cronbach Alpha values were over 0.8.
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