Everything Everywhere All at Once: A New Approach to Physical Ergonomics Assessments

This webinar will be jointly hosted by AES and HFES. You will be asked to register in Zoom once the webinar begins.

Most digital human model ergonomics software packages are used to assess a single posture per task, or maybe a single posture for 2 or 3 anthropometries. However, we know that there is task performance variability both within and between workers. This variability can be beneficial, as it distributes the risk across tissues, but it can also be a detrimental response to fatigue over the course of a workday. Assuming one posture, when there are many feasible postures, results in low reliability in the results obtained both within and between ergonomics practitioners. In addition, most ergonomics software provides several isolated assessment tools (eg. Snook & Ciriello Tables, Revised NIOSH Lifting Equation, Garg Metabolic Equations, manual arm strength etc.), but the results are not integrated for the user to facilitate a comprehensive decision on task acceptability. In this talk, I will present a new approach to ergonomics task assessments that (1) includes the determination of the full range of feasible postures for a given task, (2) performs a comprehensive analysis with multiple assessment tools, and then (3) fully integrates the results for the user. This method also facilitates the assessment of the cumulative demands when combining the subtasks comprising a full job.