Citation

Mital A. Ergonomics 1999; 42(1): 246-257.

Affiliation

Ergonomics and Engineering Controls Research Laboratory, University of Cincinnati, OH 45221-0116, USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1999, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

9973882

Abstract

Manual handling of materials continues to be a hazardous activity, leading to a very significant number of severe overexertion injuries. Designing jobs that are within the physical capabilities of workers is one approach ergonomists have adopted to redress this problem. As a result, several job design procedures have been developed over the years. However, these procedures are limited to designing or evaluating only pure lifting jobs or only the lifting aspect of a materials handling job. This paper describes a general procedure that may be used to design or analyse materials handling jobs that involve several different kinds of activities (e.g. lifting, lowering, carrying, pushing, etc). The job design/analysis procedure utilizes an elemental approach (breaking the job into elements) and relies on databases provided in A Guide to Manual Materials Handling to compute associated risk factors. The use of the procedure is demonstrated with the help of two case studies.

Language: en