Back Pain Management - health and safety for workers

Introduction

Work related Musculoskeletal Disorders (WMSDs) like Back Pain are major health issue. In order to reduce the risks of WMSDs the ergonomics of workplace should be evaluated and improved. Workers should be made aware of which movements and postures to avoid. Currently ergonomics evaluation is made with pen and paper worksheets which is time consuming, error prune and usually done offline not during the actual working hours of workers. In this project smart wearables with IMUs were used to assess postural risk relating to Pack Pain disorder during the daily activities of workers. Precisely the system detects awkward postural movements (e.g. bent forward with angle > 60°) and alert the workers immediately. Awkward postures is identified using the European Ergonomics Assessment Work Sheet (EAWS) which is standard for assessing the risk of WMSD at workplaces by defining risky postures as a risk factor among other factors.

System Overview

The wearable (feather sense) have IMU sensor to capture worker movement and orientation of body posture and send it periodically to the nrf5340dk. A manually labelled dataset were used to train a machine learning based algorithm for workers activity recognition using Edge Impulse Studio. The trained network were deployed on the nrf5340dk to monitor workers daily activity during work and alert them for non ergonomic or awkward postures using a notification sent to their mobile.

Setup and installation

For deployment, the orientation BLE service code should be deployed to adafruit feather sense board using arduino studio. After deployment, make sure that the service is successfully running by using a mobile app like nrf Connect for mobile and search for a device with name "Blue". This service will periodically advertise orientation data (Euler angles). The adafruit feather sense should be put on the worker lower back in order to egronomically assess his low back posture. After making sure that the service is running successfully, install the Egronomic assessment application to the nrf53dk . The app should collect orientation data and feed it to classifier for ergonomic assessment and advertise a BLE service with name "Zephyr Relay" indicating if the current body posture for worker is safe or not by sending chararcetrisc value of "0x00" for safe position and value of "0x01" for risky body postures. You can make a connection the "Zephyr Relay" also using nrf Connect for mobile app from your mobile phone.