Designing a web-based Automatic Ergonomic Assessment using Motion Data

Manual laborers from the industry sector are often subject to critical physical strain that lead to work-related musculoskeletal disorders. Lifting, poor posture and repetitive movements are among the causes of these disorders. In order to prevent them, several rules and methods have been established to identify ergonomic risks that the worker might be exposed during his/her activities. However, the ergonomic assessment though these methods is not a trivial task and a relevant degree of theoretical knowledge on the part of the analyst is necessary. Therefore in this paper, a web-based automatic ergonomic assessment module is proposed. The proposed module uses segment rotations acquired from inertial measurement units for the assessment and provides as feedback RULA scores, color visualisation and limb angles in a simple, intuitive and meaningful way. RULA is one of the most used observational methods for assessment of occupational risk factors for upper-extremity musculoskeletal disorders. By automatizing RULA an interesting perspective for extracting posture analytics for ergonomic assessment is opened, as well as the inclusion of new features that may complement it. For future work, the use of other features and sensors will be investigated for its implementation on the module.