Mechanical and Biomechanical Approaches for Measuring Protective Glove Adherence

Abstract

Workers wearing insufficiently adherent gloves must exert additional muscular effort to grip objects, leading to discomfort, pain and even musculoskeletal disorders of the upper limbs. The main goal of this preliminary study was to explore mechanical and biomechanical approaches for characterizing glove adherence in order to verify whether a purely mechanical method can provide results that are in agreement with a biomechanical method, which takes into account the human factor. A mechanical method was developed to measure the coefficient of friction (COF) between 23 glove models and a steel surface. A biomechanical method was also developed to measure the COF at the hand/glove and glove/steel interfaces. Six subjects performed tests with three glove models, and gave their perception of glove adherence. The comparison between the biomechanical and mechanical results revealed that both methods produced similar COF values for each glove/steel interface. Those values agreed with the subjects' perception. However, the biomechanical method revealed a stick-slip phenomenon for one out of the three glove models, which makes evaluation of the COF difficult. On the other hand, the proposed mechanical method is capable of measuring the static and dynamic COFs of various glove models. It also has the advantages of being simple, reproducible, and inexpensive.