Ergonomic Analysis And Assessment Of Risk Factors For Construction Workers

Work-related Musculoskeletal Disorders(WMSDs)is one of the most serious healthy problems in industrialized countries,which will have a bad influence on workers' physical and mental health,occupational health and career status and reduce work efficiency and cause large economic losses to individuals,families,and countries.Construction industry is one of the industries with higher incidence of WMSDs because of the more labor-intensive and higher strength compared with other industries.WMSD of construction workers can be reduced and prevented by recognizing and analysising the risk factors which can be divided into three types: physical exposures,psychosocial stressors,and individual factors.The research ergonomically analyzed the risk factors of WMSDs in construction workers and proposed an approach to assess the risk factors using smartphone.First,the paper summarized the risk factors of construction workers,including five five categories consisting of 51 specific factors.On this basis,a self-assessment method was used to investigate risk factors for specific groups of people.Through statistics of the survey results,four body parts with the highest incidence of WMSDs among construction workers were obtained.And then the risk factors most closely related to the WMSDs in each body part are obtained by single factor analysis using chi-square test and multi-factor analysis using the binary logistic regression.Based on the results of the study,recommendations are given for the prevention of WMSDs for construction workers.According to the research and related studies,The prevalence of low back pain for construction workers is far higher than that in other parts of body,leading to the main factors of lower back pain including the awkward posture and the holding time for the same work posture..In this paper,an approach is presented to assess the risk ofconstruction workers' trunk posture using mobile sensor.It takes the back which have a higher prevalence of WMSDs for construction workers as research objects and uses the built-in smartphone orientation sensor to collect data utilized to calculate the flexion-extension angle,lateral bending angle and rotation angle of the trunk posture,and then to assess the risk of posture according to the relationship between the static angle and the maximum holding time given by ISO11226: 2000.And the proposed approach is verified by thelaboratory and on–site experiments.The results show that the proposed approachis effective and applicable to describe and assess the construction workers' trunk posture.In addition,the paper proposed a real-time warning system for construction worker's trunk posture risk using smart phones in theory based on the proposed approach,with a view to provide reference for construction workers WMSDs prevention,construction site management and worker training.