Effects of lifting task parameters on body kinematics

• Main Author: Tan, Yuwei.
• Other Authors: School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/53939
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Nowadays, with aging population problem arising in Singapore, it is critical to understand how manual material handing (MMH) tasks is affecting the human body especially when there is a raised of aging people in the labour force. It is also usually assumed that MMH have direct association with low back pain (LBP). Even through with continual improvement of technology and machine, many would still manually do tasks such as lifting objects. Thus, it is important to understand what the reaction on the joint of the body is and how the musculoskeletal system behaves during MMH tasks such as lifting [1]. With numerous literature reviews discussed about different task parameters affecting the body kinematics during lifting, it is understood that load magnitude, targeted height and asymmetric angle have impact on the body kinematics. Therefore, the purpose of this experiment is to investigate the effects of task factors on the body kinematic and kinetic patterns on older people. 12 subjects (mean age of 66) performed 54 variations of lifting on load magnitudes, targeted height and asymmetric angle. As expected, the results revealed that all the three independent variables has significantly effected on body kinematics and kinetic variables. As the load increases from 5% MLC to 25% MLC, the L5/S1 joint moments would also increased from 151.64 Nm to 172.68 Nm respectively. It was concluded that our existing results present a conservative estimation of lifting task parameters in the scales of current task parameters had studied. The results also verified the extreme effects of lifting task parameters (highest load and height with an angle) would have the most effects on the body biomechanics.