Using an intelligent system to combine multiple ergonomic analytical tool outcomes into a single risk assessment

A common challenge in ergonomics today is properly selecting and applying a single ergonomic analysis tool to a job assessment, because a variety of tools, exist each having their own strengths and weaknesses. Improper application of an analysis tool increases the likelihood of high risk jobs not being detected, thus jeopardizing worker's health. Likewise, significant time and cost can be incurred unnecessarily redesigning jobs improperly identified as high risk.;Utah IDDEAS (Intelligent Data Driven Ergonomic Assessment System) is an expert system that was developed to quickly and logically aggregate the outputs of multiple analysis tools to create a new, more predictive ergonomic analysis tool. The rules in the expert system were optimized by processing health outcome data from an ergonomic study with hundreds of jobs and analyzing the resulting relationship between the system's risk estimation and the known health outcomes.;The results show that IDDEAS appears to improve in estimation ability with addition of expert knowledge and appears to be more accurate at estimating the level of risk than individual ergonomic analysis tools used alone. The results of this study also provide insight into methods of quantifying health outcomes and analysis tool outputs for use in software systems that integrate or compare ergonomic information.