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Background:Musculoskeletal disorders are a major problem in all jobs. Several methods are available for assessing the exposure to risk factors associated with musculoskeletal disorders. This study is aimed at comparing three different ergonomic risk assessment methods—rapid upper limb assessment (RULA), loading on the upper body assessment (LUBA), and new ergonomic posture assessment (NERPA) method—to predict upper extremity musculoskeletal disorders.Materials and Methods:The study was conducted on 210 workers from three different industries including pharmaceutical, automotive, and assembly in the Isfahan province. A Nordic questionnaire was used for determining the levels of musculoskeletal disorders. Then, selected postures were evaluated with RULA, LUBA, and NERPA methods. Finally, data were analyzed with Kolmogorov–Smirnov test to check the normality distribution of data, Spearman's correlation test to investigate the correlation between the assessed levels with musculoskeletal disorders, and Wilcoxon test to identify significant differences between the values with SPSS version 16.Results:Wilcoxon test revealed a significant difference between the values related to NERPA and RULA (P < 0.001), whereas no significant relation between LUBA and RULA was shown by this test (P = 0.914). The correlation coefficients of the musculoskeletal disorders' level with RULA level, NERPA level, and LUBA level were 0.74, 0.73, and 0.69, respectively.Conclusion:Low-risk levels in NERPA, medium-risk levels in LUBA, and high-risk levels in RULA are evaluated better. The results showed that RULA was the best method for assessing musculoskeletal disorders among the three methods.

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.

BackgroundLighting is one of the environmental factors affecting the performance of the control room operators. Therefore, the aim of this study was to compare the control room operators’ visual performance in two different illumination conditions at a combined cycle power plant through field-work.MethodsSixteen operators in day shift were evaluated with the Freiburg Visual Acuity test (FrACT) software at two lighting systems with different intensities. It includes the first phase with fluorescent illumination system (Power: 40 W, Color Temperature: 4000 Kelvin, Luminous Flux: 2780 Lumen and Model: Pars Shahab) and the second phase with a combined illumination system includes fluorescent and LED (Power: 48 W, Color Temperature: 4000 Kelvin, Luminous Flux: 5400 Lumen and Model: Mazinoor).ResultsBased on the results, visual performance index and visual acuity significantly increased after the intervention (p < 0.001). As to contrast, more lighting significantly reduced the percentage of recognized contrast (p < 0.001) and increased the contrast performance index (p < 0.001).ConclusionsThe results of this study showed that increasing the intensity of light from the values below the allowable limit to the values above the allowable limit would increase the visual indicators in individuals.

Objectives Healthcare workers often have unnoticed minor abrasions on their hands, putting them at risk of contracting infectious diseases from patients, if the integrity of the medical gloves is compromised. This study aimed to compare the rate and location of glove perforation between well-fitted and ill-fitted gloves. Methods The participants of this cross-sectional study were 45 midwives in the maternity ward of a hospital in Shiraz city, Iran. A total of nine pairs of medical gloves including three pairs of fit size, three pairs of gloves with one size smaller (tight), and three pairs of gloves with one size larger (loose) were given to subjects, and asked them to use the gloves during episiotomy repair operations. After completing the task, all gloves were collected safely and gloves perforation was investigated based on water test (NF EN 455-1). Results The perforation rate of the fit, tight, and loose medical gloves was 20, 37.78, and 34.81%, respectively. The results showed a significant difference between glove perforation of different glove sizes (P &lt; 0.05). In general, there was a significant difference between the perforation rate of the fit glove and ill-fitted gloves (P = 0.013). Conclusions Wearing the wrong size gloves may increase the glove perforation rate. Providing a wide range of glove sizes by the hospital management, and choosing the best glove size can be very effective in reducing the glove perforation and increasing safety for healthcare workers and patients.