Inter-Rater Reliability of Video-Based Ergonomic Job Analysis for Maintenance Work in Mineral Processing and Coal Preparation Plants

Abstract

A large proportion of fatal and non-fatal injuries in mineral processing and coal preparation plants can be attributed to maintenance and repair work. Maintenance work in the mining industry has received little attention due to the challenges associated with collecting and evaluating information on exposures to risk factors and possibly due to the adverse working conditions. The goal of this study was to develop a reliable method to systematically quantify exposures to environmental attributes and physical task demands for maintenance work in mineral processing and coal preparation plants. Hierarchical task analysis was carried out for commonly observed and reported maintenance tasks. A detailed taxonomy of environmental features and physical task demands thought to contribute to injury was created. Two raters independently coded 41 videos using the Multimedia Video Task Analysis™ software to measure the percentage of task time that workers were exposed to each of the variables defined in the taxonomy. For most exposure variables, the mean differences in exposures coded between raters were low and the correlations of exposure durations were high. For variables in which the mean differences in exposure were considered to be too high, modifications to the approach were made to improve measurement reliability. This study provides some evidence to suggest that video based ergonomic job analysis is a viable tool for characterizing the environmental and physical demands of maintenance work in mineral processing and coal preparation plants.

Development of a Digital Video-Based Occupational Risk Assessment Method

“…They were able to accurately extract information on the angles and the time spent in each angle from the video recordings. Heberger et al (20) used videos for risk assessment of maintenance workers in mineral processing and coal preparation plants. They used the videos to extract information on surface type (e.g., wood, machinery), surface condition (wet, dry), presence of obstacles, gross posture, and trunk position.…”

Development of ergonomics audits for bagging, haul truck and maintenance and repair operations in mining

“…musculoskeletal disorders, acute traumatic injuries, slips and falls) during maintenance and repair work, a systematic, simulated, real-time video-based observation study was conducted (Heberger et al 2012). The objective was to develop a methodology to quantify ergonomic and safety risk factors for maintenance and repair work in mills and prep plants.…”

Emerging Ergonomics Issues and Opportunities in Mining

“…For example, efforts to measure and summarize postures and activities of maintenance and repair workers at mine sites using goniometers and in-shoe pressure sensors proved to be difficult, with externally-worn goniometers failing due to harsh conditions. This ultimately led to a video-based approach that was time consuming due to the amount of coding from video required [ 11 ]. In other cases, we utilized laboratory simulations to study mining tasks (e.g., Nasarwanji et al, 2016; Pollard et al, 2015 [ 12 , 13 ]) because the nature of the data acquisition equipment used was too delicate for use in mining environments.…”