Abstract
Manual materials handling safety training programs typically encourage workers to make judgments regarding manual material handling risk prior to making attempts to perform the task. The objectives of this effort were to determine if: a) perceptions of MMH tasks are consistent with consensus-based lifting hazards, and b) judgments are materially affected by observer age and or gender. Photographs of orthogonally varied levels of horizontal and vertical origin and final position of a 20 Kg box lift at 0.2, 2 and 5 lifts per minute were presented to 50 males and 50 females who were distributed among age decades between 20 and 70 years. Subjects were asked to rate their perceived risk of musculoskeletal injury using magnitude estimation methods. Results showed that subjects, regardless of age, were unable to spatially perceive consensus-based biomechanical indexes of musculoskeletal hazard; this finding held regardless of age group, gender, stature, body mass, prior safe lifting practices training, or history of low back injury.
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