Development Of A Low Cost System For Lifting Related Injury Analysis

TL;DR

This paper presents a low-cost, portable system using smartphones and affordable hardware to analyze lifting injuries, enabling injury assessment in resource-limited settings.

Contribution

The study introduces an accessible biomechanical analysis framework combining smartphone-based joint angle measurement and Wii balance board force data for injury evaluation.

Findings

System effectively captures joint angles and ground reaction forces.

Muscle force profiles generated using OpenSim.

Potential to improve injury prevention in developing countries.

Abstract

In the developing countries, most of the Manual Material Handling (MMH) related tasks are labor-intensive. It is not possible for these countries to assess injuries during lifting heavy weight, as multi-camera motion capture, force plate and electromyography (EMG) systems are very expensive. In this study, we proposed an easy to use, portable and low cost system, which will help the developing countries to evaluate injuries for their workers. The system consists of two hardware and three software. The joint angle profiles are collected using smartphone camera and Kinovea software. The vertical Ground Reaction Force (GRF) is collected using Wii balance board and Brainblox software. Finally, the musculoskeletal analysis is performed using OpenSim Static Optimization tool to find the muscle force. The system will give us access to a comprehensive biomechanical analysis, from collecting joint angle profiles to generating muscle force profiles. This proposed framework has the potential to assess and prevent MMH related injuries in developing countries.