Industrial and Operations Engineering Department, Robotics Department, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, United States.
Industrial and Systems Engineering Department, Auburn University, Auburn, AL 36849, United States.
Ann Work Expo Health. 2024 Jun 6;68(5):443-465. doi: 10.1093/annweh/wxae024.
Measuring the physical demands of work is important in understanding the relationship between exposure to these job demands and their impact on the safety, health, and well-being of working people. However, work is changing and our knowledge of job demands should also evolve in anticipation of these changes. New opportunities exist for noninvasive long-term measures of physical demands through wearable motion sensors, including inertial measurement units, heart rate monitors, and muscle activity monitors. Inertial measurement units combine accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers to provide continuous measurement of a segment's motion and the ability to estimate orientation in 3-dimensional space. There is a need for a system-thinking perspective on how and when to apply these wearable sensors within the context of research and practice surrounding the measurement of physical job demands. In this paper, a framework is presented for measuring the physical work demands that can guide designers, researchers, and users to integrate and implement these advanced sensor technologies in a way that is relevant to the decision-making needs for physical demand assessment. We (i) present a literature review of the way physical demands are currently being measured, (ii) present a framework that extends the International Classification of Functioning to guide how technology can measure the facets of work, (iii) provide a background on wearable motion sensing, and (iv) define 3 categories of decision-making that influence the questions that we can ask and measures that are needed. By forming questions within these categories at each level of the framework, this approach encourages thinking about the systems-level problems inherent in the workplace and how they manifest at different scales. Applying this framework provides a systems approach to guide study designs and methodological approaches to study how work is changing and how it impacts worker safety, health, and well-being.
衡量工作的体力需求对于理解这些工作要求与工人的安全、健康和福祉之间的关系非常重要。然而，工作正在发生变化，我们对工作要求的了解也应该随着这些变化而发展。通过可穿戴运动传感器（包括惯性测量单元、心率监测器和肌肉活动监测器），可以实现对体力需求的非侵入性、长期的测量，这为我们提供了新的机会。惯性测量单元结合了加速度计、陀螺仪和磁力计，能够提供对身体运动的连续测量，并能够在三维空间中估计方位。在研究和实践中，需要从系统思维的角度来思考如何以及何时在物理工作需求的测量中应用这些可穿戴传感器。本文提出了一个衡量体力工作需求的框架，可以指导设计者、研究人员和用户以一种与物理需求评估的决策需求相关的方式整合和实施这些先进的传感器技术。我们 (i) 对当前测量体力需求的方法进行了文献综述，(ii) 提出了一个扩展国际功能分类的框架，以指导技术如何测量工作的各个方面，(iii) 提供了可穿戴运动感应的背景知识，以及 (iv) 定义了影响我们可以提出的问题和需要的测量的 3 类决策。通过在框架的每个级别内对这些类别形成问题，这种方法鼓励思考工作场所中固有的系统级问题以及它们在不同规模下的表现方式。应用该框架为指导研究设计和方法学方法提供了一种系统方法，以研究工作的变化方式以及它如何影响工人的安全、健康和福祉。
