Battling Workplace Injuries Industrial and Systems

BATTLING WORKPLACE INJURIES

I N D U S T R I A L A N D S Y S T E M S ENGINEERING

Work-related musculoskeletal disorders are among the most common reasons for lost or restricted work time and affect up to one-third of workers, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Too often, occupational health and safety personnel are left to combat these injuries using data self-reported by employees or from observational assessments, which can both be biased and imprecise. Assistant professor Mark Schall is trying to change that. With wearable technology becoming more common, Schall aims to assess the viability of using wearable sensors to track workplace exposures to physical risk factors and promote healthy workplace behaviors. The research is supported by a Mentored Research Scientist Development Award from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. “The goal is to better assess exposures and proactively understand what is happening in the workplace,” Schall said. “The overarching goal is to gather more information about how we can apply wearable technologies to make manufacturing workplaces safer.” Schall’s project involves deploying wearable sensors among a sample of 36 manufacturing workers, developing a dashboard to highlight data gathered and evaluating the effectiveness of the technologies to improve the decision-making of occupational health and safety personnel. “What’s unique about this project is it’s one of the first times that we’ve applied wearable technologies on a really broad scale to try to understand and address different concerns,” Schall said.

MARK SCHALL

Assistant Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering 708-539-8957 mark-schall@auburn.edu Website: aub.ie/MSchall