PRESENTED BY RISK & INSURANCE
Over the past 60 years, major advances in anthropometry and biomechanics have gradually reduced reliance on inadequate human-system integration efforts. This is particularly evident in the application of Digital Human Modeling (DHM). DHM can be defined as a technique of simulating human interaction between anatomically correct humans (avatars or mannequins) and scaled environments. DHM is facilitating proactive development efforts for system and process design from conception to implementation by providing insight into human-system discrepancies. Today, there are a number of commercially available DHM software packages that help designers, engineers, and ergonomists capture these discrepancies.
This presentation will cover a brief overview of Santos Human, a DHM tool created in 2003 by the University of Iowa’s Virtual Soldier Research (VSR) Program, and how BSI has utilized this tool to support client's ergonomic efforts in a number of industries.
Presented by:
Gus Arroyo
Associate Consultant
BSI
Gloveboxes are containment workspaces that are designed to allow a worker to manipulate objects where a separate atmosphere is desired. They present inherent ergonomic challenges as most of their physical features are non-adjustable. Los Alamos National Laboratory’s (LANL) Plutonium Facility has over 300 gloveboxes in use today with 400 glovebox workers performing manufacturing work inside gloveboxes for most of their work days. As a result, LANL’s ergonomics team has a specialized glovebox functional area to mitigate ergonomic risks that gloveboxes present. This presentation will focus on how a specialty ergonomics program like glovebox ergonomics can come to be established, starting from recognizing ergonomic issues in gloveboxes to maintaining a steady productive program. Some engineering solutions and worker trainings developed through this glovebox ergonomics program will also be shared in this presentation.
Presented by:
Martha Chan
Ergonomist
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Presentation slides can be downloaded here.
Utilizing Wearable Technology: Athletic Trainers & Worker Engagement
This presentation will discuss ways employers can use wearable technology to identify leading injury risk indicators and develop effective interventions, including the deployment of athletic trainers to engage at-risk employees in the prevention and management of work-related musculoskeletal disorders.
Utilizing Wearable Technology: Distribution Center Risk Mitigation
A large beverage distribution company was consistently seeing their injury totals rise within their manual material handling positions. They knew that they needed to make a change and were seeking an innovative and comprehensive program that would help to identify where their injury risks were coming from and provide a pathway forward to mitigate those issues in the future. After researching different options, they settled on a wearable sensor that monitored back postures and provided some haptic feedback to improve employee awareness. Through the use of this sensor, they developed a data driven injury prevention service utilizing sensors to improve employee awareness, identify risks, and improved the effectiveness and efficiency of their job coaching and training in the process.
Bryan Reich
Director, Industrial Athlete Programs
WorkCare, Inc.
Nick Magana
Ergonomics Program Manager
SoCal Edison
Kelson Wann, MS ATC, FMS
Solutions Advisor - Innovation & Consulting
Briotix Health’s Ergonomics
The Real Challenges of Home Working for the Global Workforce
In this talk Jon Abbott and Bill Pace of Cardinus bring together data and anecdotal lessons from the global pandemic to discuss the practical challenge of ergonomics and health in home working for the interconnected yet globally dispersed workforce. Tackling issues of regulation and compliance, the cultural, technological and society differences, and how different organizations and governments have responded to the pandemic, Jon and Bill will address how organizations can support home workers and meet the real challenges that they face, wherever they’re based.
Office Ergonomics Training — How to Do An Assessment
This program is to provide the tools and education for Management and Trainers to do an assessment, as well as educating employees with an understanding of setting up themselves in the optimal position, sitting or standing. This will address sit-stand workstations, and uses of equipment. How do to an assessment and what concerns can arise. This is not a program on solving issues by just "purchasing equipment," but provides guidelines and suggestions in selecting equipment. Also covered is concerns in healthcare settings.
Jon Abbott
Director of Sales & Marketing
Cardinus Risk Management Ltd.
Bill Pace
President
Cardinus, LLC
Mark Yen
Risk Control Consultant
Monarch Insurance Services, Inc.
This presentation is for anyone responsible for establishing, improving, or managing company ergonomics processes for their employer. It focuses on the five essential elements any successful, sustainable program should include: 1) Clear process for reducing ergonomics risk in ongoing operations 2) Clear process for ensuring ergonomics acceptability of new tools and equipment 3) Consistent worker involvement in identifying both ergonomics issues and effective countermeasures 4) Systematic linkages to continuous improvement initiatives (such as lean production or six sigma) 5) Appropriate responsibilities for everyone involved in the company ergonomics process. Dr. Budnick will share his experience and a variety of resources attendees can use to plan, launch, or accelerate ergonomics process improvements in their own companies.
Too many large organizations have launched an ergonomics process only to have it fizzle when the business climate and direction changes, when key participants roll-over, or when the low-hanging, easy fixes have been completed. Failure to initiate and maintain an effective process can result in loss of credibility and trust by employees and management, wasted resources, and poor results. The key to long-term success in ergonomics is to build a strong foundation with solid planning. This session will review the critical elements of establishing and deploying a large-scale workplace ergonomics process to prevent the risk of musculoskeletal disorders. Based on real-world experience, proven management practices, and data mined from hundreds of successful programs, this session will give participants a roadmap to follow year-by-year. We’ll discuss goal setting, implementation, design guidelines for engineers, tackling capital projects, program expansion, and more.
Dr. Peter Budnick
Founder and President
ErgoWeb
Jeff Sanford
Director of Consulting
VelocityEHS/Humantech
Healthcare workers continue to experience one of the highest injury rates in the nation. Developing and implementing solutions is made difficult by obstacles unique to this work environment. To address the situation, Tenet Health, one of the nation’s largest hospital groups, implemented a comprehensive program that includes a safe patient handling solution to reduce injury risk exposure but also focuses on managing the first report of an injury, communicating with the employee, and active transitional duty to help effectively manage injuries when they occur. The presentation will include components of a successful program, discuss key participants and their roles, and share outcomes including reduced cost and lost time.
Compassion fatigue, burnout, and work/life balance wear heavily on healthcare professionals and cause them to leave the profession early and permanently. Coupled with heavy caseloads, limited control, long duty hours, and the reduced opportunity for sleep, these factors can lead to fatigue-related errors and injury. This session will discuss the impact of overtime on occupational injury rates, illness, and errors, and provide a review of the literature on psychological and physiological stress and their effects on sleep and fatigue. The session will also look at overtime management programs and the health effects from work schedules. Lastly, it will review Fatigue Countermeasures Programs for Nurses (FCMPN).
Curt DeWeese
Director
Atlas Injury Prevention Solutions
Tricia Finley
Manager Workers’ Compensation/Auto
Tenet Health
Kathy Espinoza
AVP, Ergonomics & Safety
Keenan and Associates
Recent evidence has demonstrated that musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) may be the result of a fatigue failure process, where repetitions at higher forces are much more damaging to tissues than repetitions at lower stresses. Fortunately, fatigue failure theory provides methods that are very useful in terms of estimating this risk of MSDs, and can even easily combine the risks associated with multiple tasks into an overall risk score. Three new risk assessment tools have been developed on this basis: 1) LiFFT (for manual lifting/lowering tasks, 2) DUET (for hand/wrist) intensive tasks, and 3) The Shoulder Tool (for shoulder intensive tasks). Each of these tools have shown strong dose-response relationships to injuries of the joints in question. In this presentation we will demonstrate the use of these easy-to-use tools and will discuss the interpretation of tool results.
Have you ever considered becoming a professionally certified ergonomist? Have you wondered how your education and experience qualify or what educational courses you might need to complete before submitting an application? Do you want to showcase your practical skills work that might include proprietary information? If so, this presentation is for you!
Sean Gallagher
Associate Professor
Auburn University
Rachel Michael
Director of Consulting Services
Exponent EHF
Communicating the value of ergonomics to business stakeholders is critical for ergonomics interventions and initiatives. When ergonomics is done right, there are two primary positive outcomes – improved employee well-being and improved business performance. Employee well-being benefits include reducing causal absenteeism, first aid cases, modified duty cases, recordable injuries, lost-time cases, workers' compensation claim costs. Business performance benefits of ergonomics include enhanced product quality, increased manufacturing performance, improved employee engagement. Participants will learn how best to communicate the value of ergonomics to business stakeholders in the language and metric they understand — value. In addition, an effective and efficient method to project the financial impact of ergonomics interventions and initiatives will be introduced. The research science and rationale for the tool will be explained and the tool will be demonstrated using case studies.
The session will demonstrate various case scenarios in which technology and science have been used to understand and confirm effective interventions for various safety initiatives, worksite modifications, and training approaches. The presentation will explore and demonstrate methods to analyze proposed safety initiatives and changes that occurred at Honda of North America, The Boeing Company, and US Tsubaki as a result of a scientific method. Each description will discuss the practical applications involved in each challenging situation. The methods will be outlined in such a way that attendees will be able to learn and apply in their own relevant and respective industries.
Blake McGowan
Director of Research
Velocity EHS
Patrick Carley
Professor
American International College
The biggest challenge is that many of the worker characteristics have changed (older, higher BMIs, etc.) well the assessment methods have remained the same. Current insurance, government, and international data suggest that musculoskeletal type injuries are still on the rise impacting everything from work comp costs, staffing, absenteeism, and productivity. What is need is a shift from observing what employees are doing at work to understanding the employee's internal physiological and biomechanical response to work. Using advanced wearables and dynamic biomechanical modeling can greatly affect the accuracy of assessments and the speed in which assessments are performed across multiple joints and planes of movement. Objective data can also be used to better predict the impact of changes on risk and productivity improvements.
As the world around us becomes more and more connected and data-driven, companies have the potential to harness valuable information to benefit their businesses and workers. This session will discuss how wearable safety technology, machine learning, AI, and cloud computing are helping safety leaders gain valuable insight into understanding workplace risks, keeping workers safe, and mitigating hazards before incidents and claims occur. Case studies from deployments of wearables in a variety of industrial environments will be examined and examples provided of how the data gathered from wearables has led to work changes and process improvements, environmental hazards detected, uncovering harmful human motion, and positively impacting safety culture while respecting employee privacy.
Scott Smith
Casualty Risk Consulting Ergonomics Team Leader
Aon Global Risk Consulting
Tom West
VP
MākuSafe
The marketplace has created numerous material handling tools to aid workers in the traditional facility-based operations. These tools however have limitation when working in the field. Ultimately, sometimes you must move the ROCK (aka the mattress, sofa, dresser, etc.). This requires a worker to be knowledgeable in the principles of proper body mechanics. In working with a large home delivery client, we trained workers in an experiential learning model that emphasizes the use of “core moves” involved with their work tasks. Material handling training has always gotten a bad wrap as being less than effective. To dispel those concerns, we have recently completed a study utilizing a motion capture technology that demonstrated the effectiveness of the core moves. Overexertion Injuries related to Manual Material Handling account for more than 30% of all recordable injuries, according to the 2019 Liberty Mutual Insurance data. As a result, training employees on proper lifting technique, biomechanics and how to eliminate wasted motion in their daily routine is a common practice to reduce fatigue and potential injury. However, training can be ineffective if it is not applicable, scalable and disrupts operations schedule.
Presented by:
Drew Bossen, PT, MBA
Executive Vice President
Atlas Injury Prevention Solutions
Lisa Krefft OTR/L, MSLc
Vice President of Partner Relations
MyAbilities Technologies
Scott Ege, PT, MS
President
Ege WorkSmart Solutions PC
The MANUAL HANDLING BOOTCAMP – is a customized program that has proven to provide employees with an experience that is unforgettable. In the presentation, we will provide insight on our methodology to engage employees and how to sustain retention of the training information. We will also share success stories and the results our clients are having within 18 months of starting their own program.
Presented by:
Brock Anderson MS, CPE, LSSBB, CSCS
Owner & Principal Consultant
Ergo-ology
Jayne Welliver ASP
Safety & Loss Prevention Mgr
Coca-Cola Consolidated
Presentation slides can be downloaded here.
Webinar Sponsor
As companies are allowing more employees to work from home indefinitely, they now have to make several critical financial decisions and identify potential risks, not previously considered in a structured office-working environment. This webinar will feature a panel of experts who will discuss the financial and risk considerations companies should be aware of as they navigate this new WFH trend.