Human responses to vibration and vibration control

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The primary goal of this research proposal is to investigate human responses to occupational whole-body and segmental vibration exposure through systematic analytical and experimental investigations, and to seek effective interventions through vibration control. The motivations for the research stem from the fact that occupational exposure to segmental and whole-body mechanical vibration has been associated with an array of musculoskeletal disorders and safety risks. For example, the occupational exposure of hand-transmitted vibration (HTV) arising from hand-held power tools vibration has been related to various disorders in vascular, sensorineural and musculoskeletal structures of the hand-arm system, while the exposure to WBV of road and off-road work vehicles has been related to disorders of the spine and supporting structure, discomfort, fatigue and loss of working efficiency. The annual costs of such disorders in US, Canada, Europe and Japan has been estimated in the order of several billions of dollars, including the absenteeism, loss of productivity and health and compensation costs. The research program will focus on a number of specific studies in order to achieve its specific goals, which will include: (i) development of mulitbody dynamic models of the upper body seated with rigid and flexible supports and exposed to WBV; (ii) development of a multi-dimensional model of the human hand-arm exposed to HTV; (iii) explore methods for identifying reliable model parameters; (iv) investigate vibration energy transfer to various substructures within the biological system, and explore alternate weightings and its relations with the available epidemiological data; (v) characterize biodynamic responses of the seated human body to whole-body vibration along the horizontal axes; and (vi) explore vibration control mechanisms to reduce the vibration dosage for the seated body. The research works are expected to contribute to the ongoing global standardization efforts towards building guidelines and methods for assessing the health and safety risks imposed by occupational shock and vibration exposures.