OBJECTIVE Ergonomic assessment and recommendations may help people with arthritis maintain employment; however, most ergonomic tools are designed to assess injury risk in the general population and are not specific to the needs of people with inflammatory arthritis (IA). Our objectives were to design and pilot test an ergonomic assessment tool for people with IA and to propose ergonomic modific...

Background: Musculoskeletal symptoms are the main cause of loss of working time, and increase in labor costs. Poor posture is the most important risk factor for work-related musculoskeletal symptoms. This study aimed at evaluating the role of ergonomic risk factors in different surgical (open surgery, laparoscopy, and microsurgery) in the frequency or resonance frequency of musculoskeletal symp...

N. Kumar Kittusamy, Sc.D., is a research engineer at NIOSH’s Spokane (WA) Research Lab. He conducts research related to safety and health issues in mining and construction. Prior to joining NIOSH, he was an assistant professor in the Dept. of Safety Technology at Marshall University, where he was also coordinator of the mine safety and health program. Kittusamy holds a B.S. in Industrial Engine...

This study quantifies the impact of psychosocial work environment factors on the risk of disability pension. Differences in risk of disability pension were estimated in a representative sample of Danish employees followed for a total of 118 117 person-years of risk time. After control for smoking, BMI and ergonomic work environment, low decision authority and low variation in work showed a stat...

Objectives: An effective safety management requires paying attention to human factors. One of the most important methods for achievement to accident prevention is using safety climate or safety culture. Moreover, some studies suggest that in most organizations behavior contributes to 86-96% of all injuries. This cross-sectional study was performed on the functional units’ workers of Khuzestan P...

Occupational hazards exist, if the design of the work situation is not in accordance with ergonomic design principles. At assembly lines ergonomics is applied to the design of work equipment and tasks and to work organisation. The ignoring of ergonomic principles in planning and design of assembly work leads to unfavourable working posture, action force and material handling. Disorders of the m...

Improper application of an ergonomic analysis tool increases the likelihood of high-risk jobs not being detected, thus jeopardising worker’s health. Likewise, significant time and cost may be incurred by redesigning jobs improperly identified as high risk. Utah Intelligent Data Driven Ergonomic Assessment System (IDDEAS) is an expert system that aggregates the outputs of multiple analysis tools...