Ergonomic risk assessment of developing musculoskeletal disorders in workers with the Microsoft Kinect: TRACK TMS

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that low-cost Microsoft Kinect cameras can effectively quantify workers' movements, aiding ergonomic risk assessments for musculoskeletal disorders, exemplified through professional musicians' repetitive gestures.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel application of Microsoft Kinect for ergonomic risk assessment, specifically quantifying motion in musicians to evaluate potential musculoskeletal disorder risks.

Findings

Kinect accurately captures musicians' gestures.

Low-cost cameras can assist in ergonomic risk scoring.

Potential for non-intrusive ergonomic assessments.

Abstract

Routine ergonomic assessment of postures and gestures in the workplace are mostly conducted by visual observations, either direct or based on video recordings. Nowadays, low-cost three-dimensional cameras like Microsoft Kinect open the possibility of recording the full kinematics of workers in a non-intrusive way, providing a more precise, and reliable assessment of their motor strategies. As an illustration, we focus on a peculiar kind of workers: professional musicians (violinists), whose playing is representative of a work situation involving repeated gestures and postures that can be described as non-ergonomic. We show that the Microsoft Kinect can be efficiently used to quantify the motion performed by these musicians. Moreover, we argue that low-cost three-dimensional cameras can be a useful aid in ergonomic risk assessment of developing musculoskeletal disorders and give the example of the repetition of movements and postural items included in the OCRA checklist, whose scoring can be facilitated by such a device, as addressed in our TRACK TMS research project.