Measuring Operator's Pain: Toward Evaluating Musculoskeletal Disorder at Work

Abstract

Abstract-Musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) have affected an increasing number of people in the active general population. In this perspective, we developed a measuring tool taking muscle activities in certain regions of the body, standing posture taking the center of pressure under the feet and feet positions. This tool also comprises an instrumented helmet containing an electroencephalogram (EEG) to measure brain activity, and an accelerometer reporting the movements of the head. Then, our tool comprises both non-invasive instrumented insole and safety helmet. Moreover, the same tool measures muscular activities in specific regions of the body using an electromyogram (EMG). The aim is to combine all the data in order to identify consistent patterns between brain activity, postures, movements and muscle activity, and then, understand their connection to the development of MSDs. This paper presents three situations reported to be a risk for MSDs and an analysis of the signals is presented in order to differentiate adequate or abnormal posture.

Sensor Technologies to Manage the Physiological Traits of Chronic Pain: A Review

“…The origin of musculoskeletal pain is often associated with inappropriate postures or movements [148,149,169]. Such is the case of the study reported in [150], which suggests a relation between the sitting time during the full day and specifically during work time, and the intensity of neck/ shoulder pain in workers developing manual work.…”

“…This scenario justifies current efforts for the development of objective physical activity evaluation systems for the identification of pain-related activities (breast pain, headache, etc.) [137,138], for the evaluation of pain intensity [139][140][141][142][143][144][145][146][147], for the detection of postures, movements or activities that can produce pain [148][149][150][151][152][153], or for the improvement of quality of life and a reduction of pain intensity [154][155][156][157][158].…”

Wearable Devices for Classification of Inadequate Posture at Work Using Neural Networks

“…In other studies related to the computation of the risk of fall, we also use only one enactive insole (located on the dominant limb) with successful results [ 44 ]. All this makes it possible to reduce the production cost of the device and use a minimal configuration and architecture (already presented in two other studies [ 45 , 46 ]). This allows the classification of the postures, not to optimize this configuration.…”

Toward EEG-Based BCI Applications for Industry 4.0: Challenges and Possible Applications

“…In particular, fatigue monitoring is more considered as a valuable tool in repetitive and automatic tasks such as driving, piloting or quality control (e.g., Zhang et al, 2017;Huang et al, 2019). For this reason, some solutions that integrate EEG captors within worksite helmets (e.g., Li et al, 2014;Barkallah et al, 2015) or under headwears (e.g., Zhang et al, 2017) have already been proposed to warn users whenever a critical drowsiness threshold is reached.…”