The aim of this study was to formulate the relationship between the total perceived discomfort of the upper limb and perceived discomforts of each degree of freedom (DOF). The biomechanical analysis was performed based on the posture and load classification of the rapid upper limb assessment (RULA), and the joint moments and perceived discomforts of each DOF were calculated. The summary score o...

UNLABELLED The objective was to analyze the work activity and identify risk factors that could account for musculoskeletal disorders in the upper extremities, shoulder and neck of workers of a transport values company in Venezuela. The methods used were: collective interview, tasks observation, evaluation of posture with RULA method and evaluation of repetitive motions with the OCRA method. Fiv...

Information of hotel cleaners’ musculoskeletal pain can be acquired by subjective survey on patients. The ultrasonic waves and X-ray examination can reveal the parts of muscular trauma, bones and joints, and fracture. Medical instruments can recognize the situation musculoskeletal pain and related treatment and recovery will be offered. However, after pain is relieved, hotel cleaners often expe...

This work presents a system that permits a real-time ergonomic assessment of manual tasks in an industrial environment. First, a biomechanical model of the upper body has been developed by using inertial sensors placed at different locations on the upper body. Based on this model, a computerized RULA ergonomic assessment was implemented to permit a global risk assessment of musculoskeletal diso...

The Rapid Upper Limb Assessment (RULA) survey is a posture-sampling tool used specifically to examine the level of risk associated with upper limb disorders of individual workers. This paper examines the relationship between RULA's postural scoring system and measures of surface electromyography (EMG), self-reports of discomfort, and job attitude questionnaires. Twenty participants each perform...

Evaluation of potential risks of musculoskeletal disorders in real workstations is challenging as the environment is cluttered, which makes it difficult to correctly assess the pose of a worker. Being marker-free and calibration-free, Microsoft Kinect is a promising device to assess these poses, but it can deliver unreliable poses especially when occlusions occur. To overcome this problem, we p...