Caster Concepts Q&A Series: Ergonomics Expert Jim Potvin
After his Applied Ergonomics Society's Pre-Conference Workshop on Recent Advances in Physical Ergonomics Assessment Tools, we caught up with event moderator and ergonomics expert and consultant Jim Potvin , Co-Founder & Co-Owner of Work(s) Ergo Inc. and President & Owner of Potvin Biomechanics Inc., to get insight on ergonomics and workplace health and safety.
Q: How can ergonomics impact manual material handling tasks and intensive occupational tasks?
A: Ergonomics has a huge role to play in both guiding occupational tasks designs and evaluating their injury risk. The earlier ergonomics can be integrated into the design process, the better. Proactive assessments are much more effective, and much less expensive, than reacting to issues once injuries and/or quality issues arise. Material handling tasks can be particularly demanding, so it’s important that task evaluations use high quality ergonomics assessment tools that evaluate peak and/or repetitive force/torque demands and compare those to human strength and endurance capacities based on solid research. Combined with emerging technologies for digital human models and work simulation, most injury risks can be identified early in the design process, so they can be eliminated before they ever become injuries.
Q: How do you evaluate corporate ergonomics tools and processes?
For most of my career, I was a professor with my own research lab, so my evaluations of ergonomic tools have always focussed on their scientific basis. New tools often look promising but, when you do a deep dive into their assumptions and limitations, you find that they may not actually be valid and/or effective for quantifying the risk of musculoskeletal injury risk. This is true of even the most popular tools. Practitioners may be drawn to the latest technology to, say, capture postures or augment human capabilities, but must be diligent to evaluate if there is sufficient scientific data to support the accuracy of the measurements, the validity of the outputs, and/or the efficacy & comfort of the mechanical systems we put on workers. A new technology or process may seem to have great potential, but often needs time to generate a comprehensive data set to support it.
Q: What would you recommend to manufacturing businesses looking to implement workplace safety measures?
A: I believe that a good corporate ergonomics process must use only validated assessment tools and integrate ergonomics as early as possible when designing occupational tasks. Make decisions that are data-driven and don’t just focus on injury statistics to support your new safety measures. Factors like improved work quality, decreased scrap, and reduced absenteeism will often accompany designs based on solid ergonomics principles.
Q: When it comes to material handling, how does having an optimized caster affect ergonomics and improve safety?
A: For my own ergonomics software, I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about how to quantify the demands associated with pushing and pulling tasks, which have higher peak demands during the initial acceleration phase, and more fatiguing demands during the longer sustained phase. Optimized casters reduce the demands for both phases, decreasing the risk of both acute and chronic injuries to the lower back and shoulders. The weight of objects being pushed or pulled will have a large effect on physical demands, but so too will the quality and maintenance of the casters. Both contribute to the forces required to accelerate, and then maintain, push/pull motions so having high quality casters, optimized to the conditions, will go a long way towards reducing the risk of musculoskeletal injuries associated with these tasks.
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Q: What do you think the future of injury prevention and ergonomics entails? What advancements do you hope to see?
A: I am very encouraged by the quality of the young people choosing ergonomics as a career path. That’s the renewable resource we need to continue to encourage and mentor. With regards to ergonomics assessment tools, we need to produce more research to facilitate the development of methods that fully integrate biomechanics, physiology, psychophysics and epidemiology criteria in valid assessments. Finally, I believe that we need to move away from tools that assess single postures (even as that becomes easier to do with our own smartphones), to a process that better represents the variability in postures, demands and risk, associated with performing the same tasks in different ways with different body sizes. We need to embrace the variability in task performance and ensure jobs are designed in a way that acknowledges and accounts for that variability. This will have the added benefit of ensuring more consistency in the decisions being made, but within and between ergonomics practitioners.
Interested in learning more? Connect with Jim Potvin online on the platforms linked below:
Thanks Jim for sharing these thoughts.. Casters are in fact a safety item in today's manufacturing processes. When investing in safety, follow the data, not the rhetoric. Thanks to Ergonauts Performance Technologies for providing the platform for safety and thanks to Conscious Capitalism, Inc. for raising the awareness of running conscious companies Caster Concepts #KeepHammering