Abstract
Nurses are at increased risk to develop musculoskeletal disorders (in particular low back pain) due to prolonged exposure to awkward postures, but there is a lack of quantitative objective measurements useful to characterize such postures. In the present study, we employed a single wearable inertial measurement unit (IMU) placed in the low back to monitor trunk flexion of eleven professional nurses working at maternity and cardiology wards during two hours of a regular shift. Trunk movement was analyzed using an exposure variation analysis approach which classifies flexion in three classes (i.e. 30–60°, 60–90° and >90°). The results show that tested nurses spent 3.5% of the monitored time with their trunk flexed between 30 and 60° and 0.2% between 60 and 90°. The IMU-based approach appears suitable to perform long-term monitoring of trunk postures in workers at risk for musculoskeletal disorders, overcoming the limitation of the observational methods and questionnaires.
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Porta, M., Campagna, M., Mura, G.M., Pau, M. (2020). Quantitative Assessment of Trunk Flexion in Nurses Using Wearable Inertial Sensor: A Pilot Study. In: Karwowski, W., Goonetilleke, R., Xiong, S., Goossens, R., Murata, A. (eds) Advances in Physical, Social & Occupational Ergonomics. AHFE 2020. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1215. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51549-2_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51549-2_2
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