Trunk stresses in construction and other industrial workers.

One of the problems arising from the consideration of safely during manual handling in industry has been, firstly, a definition of those workers at risk and, secondly, a definition of safely. To be able objectively to identify those a risk and quantify the stress to which they are exposed, a more rigorous series of criteria is required if prevention of back pain in industry is to be achieved. This paper concerns such a methodology which allows the quantification of truncal stresses to which identifiable high-risk industrial groups are exposed. The methodology is described using three industrial examples of populations who suffer considerable back hazard from their occupations. In the examples given, both direct measurements of truncal stresses will be presented together with contour applications whereby the safety of a handling task can be assessed by reference to diagrams.