Low back injuries are highly prevalent in industry, recreational environs and in work at home. It is believed that humans are not able to judge the biomechanical risk of injury inherent with performing lifting tasks. This experiment studies the impact of lifting geometry (e.g., the horizontal, vertical and travel distances of a lift), frequency, gender and age upon an observer's perception of injury risk when looking at a task before attempting a lift. Subjects completed a questionnaire with a series of 54 pictures showing different lifting tasks; subjects then ranked their perceived risk of injury on a scale of 0= no risk of injury through 10= maximum risk of injury. Results showed that people misjudge the risk of injury based on NIOSH WPG 1981 guidelines by overestimating the risk of injury. Also results reflected that people's responses were based on physiological aspects. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Special thanks to God for giving me supporting parents, sister and family. They have always inspired me and loved me through my entire career in spite of the distance. I would also like to thank my husband for his love and encouragement during the toughest times and for accompanying me all along the way.
Manual materials handling safety training programs typically encourage workers to make judgments regarding manual material handling risk prior to making attempts to perform the task. The objectives of this effort were to determine if: a) perceptions of MMH tasks are consistent with consensus-based lifting hazards, and b) judgments are materially affected by observer age and or gender. Photographs of orthogonally varied levels of horizontal and vertical origin and final position of a 20 Kg box lift at 0.2, 2 and 5 lifts per minute were presented to 50 males and 50 females who were distributed among age decades between 20 and 70 years. Subjects were asked to rate their perceived risk of musculoskeletal injury using magnitude estimation methods. Results showed that subjects, regardless of age, were unable to spatially perceive consensus-based biomechanical indexes of musculoskeletal hazard; this finding held regardless of age group, gender, stature, body mass, prior safe lifting practices training, or history of low back injury.
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