Development and Use of Devices for Ergonomic Assessment and Comfort Enhancement in Industrial Environments

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The first objective of this proposal is to understand the effects of muscle fatigue on posture, muscle activation, muscle latency and vibration transmissibility, and then to use the information to further develop active whole-body vibration (WBV) attenuation devices for seats in large mobile equipment. It is well known that large mobile machines expose operators to WBV exposure which results in seated operators experiencing muscle fatigue. However, what is not well understood are the effects of muscle fatigue on posture, muscle activation, muscle latency and vibration transmissibility during WBV exposure. Over the course of this proposal, a series of studies will systematically quantify this for individual sinusoidal vibration axes and combined axis exposures at a number of discrete frequencies before and after participants complete a low back fatiguing protocol. Studies will be conducted on a lab located hexapod robot simulator where participants will sit on a seat attached to the robot platform.  Similar investigations will be conducted using simulations that use vibration recordings obtained from a working machine but implemented on the laboratory located robot where participants will use a VR headset along with joystick controls and gas and brake pedals. Over the course of this proposal a newly designed and built active vibration control device will also be further developed and tested using the same protocols noted above. The second objective of the proposal will be to further develop and use a recently designed wearable wrist device for the assessment of kinematics and kinetics and the prediction of muscles forces during the performance of simulated workplace tasks. Data obtained from the wrist wearable device and fingertip force sensors during simulated workplace tasks performed in the laboratory will be used to create a model of the hand and forearm which will be able to predict muscle forces. The long term objective of this research program is to develop a suite of reasonably priced active vibration control devices which can be used on any seat for a variety of large mobile equipment over a variety of terrains in order to improve ISO 2631-1[10] predicted operator comfort. The second long term objective is to develop and use devices for ergonomic assessment which will provide input data for validated models that predict muscle forces. The ability to accurately predict muscle forces could allow us as engineers to virtually prototype hand tools and tasks with an aim to design them in a way that minimizes muscle force requirements while maintaining neutral wrist postures. Another long term objective is the implementation of machine learning techniques to detect subtle kinematic changes that might occur as a worker is beginning to fatigue so that the device alerts them that they need to take a break and/or change what they're doing.