Body Parts and Nature of Injuries Associated with Manual Materials Handling Workers' Compensation Claims

Author(s):  
Lobat Hashemi ◽  
Patrick G. Dempsey

Workers' compensation claims associated with manual materials handling (MMH) represent the single largest source of claims and costs. There have been few analyses of such losses associated with MMH. An examination of the nature of the injuries associated with MMH as well as the body parts most frequently affected can lead to a better understanding of the losses attributed to MMH to suggest further research efforts. A large sample of MMH claims was analyzed and stratified with respect to body part affected and the nature of the injury. The cost distribution associated with the claims was considerably skewed, and an attempt to fit several known distributions to the data did not produce a statistically-significant fit. The lower back area and upper extremities were the body parts associated with the majority of claims. Strain was the nature of injury most frequently reported (51.3%). Lower back area strains were the most frequently reported nature of injury and body part combination.

1982 ◽  
Vol 26 (6) ◽  
pp. 498-502
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Smith ◽  
Richard Ginnold ◽  
Walter Brandl

There is growing appreciation among human factors and safety specialists regarding the frequent link between ergonomic defects in job, workstation, and/or equipment design, and job-related accidents and injuries. With the objective of critically addressing this question, we analyzed the nature and cause of disabling injuries suffered by employees of a large northwest telephone company over the period 5/74 through 6/81. The data base consists of disabling injury claims accepted by the Oregon Workers Compensation Department. A total of 395 claims over the 86 month period were analyzed. We judged that the injury source designations were specific enough to enable us to provisionally categorize the injuries into three major groups: (1) probable ergonomic cause (manual materials handling); (2) possible ergonomic cause (falls, free bodily motion); and non-ergonomic cause (all other injury sources). Under this categorization, 26.1% of the disabling injuries had probable, 49.4% possible, and 24.5% no ergonomic cause. Free bodily motion and falls each accounted for 25% of all injuries, with lifting (14%) the third most common source of injury. Muscular strain from all sources was the most frequent type of injury, representing 59% of all injuries. The body part most frequently affected was the back (39% of total injuries; 50% of all strains). The results suggest that ergonomic factors may play a significant if not dominant role in disabling injuries suffered by telephone workers, with muscular strain, particularly to the back, being the most prevalent type of injury.


Author(s):  
Navneet Kaur Baidwan ◽  
Marizen R. Ramirez ◽  
Fred Gerr ◽  
Daniel Boonstra ◽  
Joseph E. Cavanaugh ◽  
...  

(1) Background: There is no national surveillance of agricultural injuries, despite agricultural occupations being among the most hazardous in the U.S. This effort uses workers’ compensation (WC) data to estimate the burden of agricultural injuries and the likelihood of experiencing an injury by body part involved, cause, and nature in farming operations. (2) Methods: WC data from 2010 to 2016 provided by a large insurance company covering small to medium-sized farm operations from 14 U.S. states was used. We investigated the associations between injury characteristics and WC costs and the risk of having a more severe versus a less severe claim. The proportion of costs attributable to specific claim types was calculated. (3) Results: Of a total 1000 claims, 67% were medical only. The total cost incurred by WC payable claims (n = 866) was USD 21.5 million. Of this, 96% was attributable to more severe claims resulting in disabilities or death. The most common body part injured was the distal upper extremity. Falling or flying objects and collisions were the most expensive and common causes of injury. (4) Conclusions: Characterizing the cost and severity of agricultural injury by key injury characteristics may be useful when prioritizing prevention efforts in partnership with insurance companies and agricultural operations.


2010 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 112-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brennen W. Mills ◽  
Owen B. J. Carter ◽  
Robert J. Donovan

The objective of this case study was to experimentally manipulate the impact on arousal and recall of two characteristics frequently occurring in gruesome depictions of body parts in smoking cessation advertisements: the presence or absence of an external physical insult to the body part depicted; whether or not the image contains a clear figure/ground demarcation. Three hundred participants (46% male, 54% female; mean age 27.3 years, SD = 11.4) participated in a two-stage online study wherein they viewed and responded to a series of gruesome 4-s video images. Seventy-two video clips were created to provide a sample of images across the two conditions: physical insult versus no insult and clear figure/ground demarcation versus merged or no clear figure/ground demarcation. In stage one, participants viewed a randomly ordered series of 36 video clips and rated how “confronting” they considered each to be. Seven days later (stage two), to test recall of each video image, participants viewed all 72 clips and were asked to identify those they had seen previously. Images containing a physical insult were consistently rated more confronting and were remembered more accurately than images with no physical insult. Images with a clear figure/ground demarcation were rated as no more confronting but were consistently recalled with greater accuracy than those with unclear figure/ground demarcation. Makers of gruesome health warning television advertisements should incorporate some form of physical insult and use a clear figure/ground demarcation to maximize image recall and subsequent potential advertising effectiveness.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (3.24) ◽  
pp. 44
Author(s):  
Norlizaa Mohamad ◽  
Jafri Mohd Rohani ◽  
Ismail Abdul Rahman ◽  
Anis Amira Mat Zuki

Prolonged standing is one of the common activities in electronic industry as the task requirement. Prolonged standing can cause discomfort on the body of the workers and can lead to injury and occupational disease. The purpose of this study is to investigate standing workers perception on the fatigue and the discomfort on their respective body region for 12 hours working time. The subjects are the 80 workers with a good health condition and at least 6 months tenure. The subject data are collected via questionnaires and Likert scale to define the discomfort, pain, and fatigue. The workers were interviewed regarding their job and perceived fatigue discomfort. The results show the domination of the lower body region with the higher mean at the lower back, legs, and foot ankle. No statistically significant differences were found between the job tenure and body part discomfort pain and fatigue. There is a significant relation between gender and discomfort pain on legs and foot ankle. The result also shows a strong relation between age and the discomfort body parts of thigh and foot ankle. The perceptions of the workers towards discomfort pain and fatigue cause by prolonged standing during performing the task. The results from this study will provide a view for industrial consultants or ergonomist with evidence to support for ergonomic interventions for prolonged standing activity such as job rotation and work-rest schedule. 


2012 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 319-335
Author(s):  
Bistoon Abasi ◽  
Amer Gheitury

Human body as a universal possession of human beings constitutes an interesting domain where questions regarding semantic categorisations might be sought crosslinguistically. In the following, we will attempt to describe the terms used to refer to the body in Hawrami, an Iranian language spoken in Paveh, a small township in the western province of Kermanshah near Iraqi borders. Due to the scarcity of written material, the inventory of 202 terms referring to external and internal body parts were obtained through a field work, which took a long time, and techniques, such as the “colouring task”, observation and recording the terms as used in ordinary conversations and informal interviews with native speakers. The semantic properties of the terms and the way they are related in a partonymy or locative relationship were also investigated. As far as universals of body part terms are concerned, while conforming to ‘depth principle’ concerning the number of levels each partonomy may consist of, Hawrami violates an important feature of this principle by not allowing transitive relations between different levels of partonomic hierarchies. In addition, Hawrami lacks a term for labelling the ‘whole’.


2002 ◽  
Vol 10 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 341-367 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ning Yu

This study presents a semantic analysis of how emotions and emotional experiences are described in Chinese. It focuses on conventionalized expressions in Chinese, namely compounds and idioms, which contain body-part terms. The body-part terms are divided into two classes: those denoting external body parts and those denoting internal body parts or organs. It is found that, with a few exceptions, the expressions involving external body parts are originally metonymic, describing emotions in terms of their externally observable bodily events and processes. However, once conventionalized, these expressions are also used metaphorically regardless of emotional symptoms or gestures. The expressions involving internal organs evoke imaginary bodily images that are primarily metaphorical. It is found that the metaphors, though imaginary in nature, are not really all arbitrary. They seem to have a bodily or psychological basis, although they are inevitably influenced by cultural models.


1970 ◽  
Vol 176 (1044) ◽  
pp. 291-293

It is generally assumed that in multicellular organisms the diversity of the different cell types is the result of different gene activity which becomes manifest in the course of development. This theoretical concept of cell differentiation was developed on the basis of results obtained from a relatively small number of suitable experimental systems. One of them comprises the imaginal disks of the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster . Imaginal disks are larval primordia in holometabolic insects such as flies and mosquitoes, and consist of densely packed populations of morphologically uniform cells. They give rise to defined structures of the adult body (mainly integument), thus replacing parts of the larva which are almost completely histolysed during metamorphosis. The prospective fate of the various imaginal disks can be tested, for example, by transplantation experiments. Individual disks are removed from larvae of a genetically marked strain and transplanted into the body cavity of another larva with which the transplants undergo metamorphosis. The metamorphosed derivatives of the disks are then found in the abdomen of the fly and can be microscopically identified on the basis of the morphology of bristles, hairs and other structural features of the integument. The same method is applied for examination of the developmental performance of disk fragments. From the results of such experiments the following conclusions are drawn: (1) Individual disks of fully grown larvae, that is larvae which are ready to pupate, are determined (programmed) for exactly defined body parts of the adult organism. (2) The individual subregions of such a body part can be localized precisely within a disk. Based on these facts fate maps (anlage plans) can be worked out. (3) From experiments in which different genetically marked disks are intermingled and then transplanted into larvae it is concluded that even single cells are determined for structures of a specific body region.


PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. e0247162
Author(s):  
Kristian Snyder ◽  
Brennan Thomas ◽  
Ming-Lun Lu ◽  
Rashmi Jha ◽  
Menekse S. Barim ◽  
...  

Occupationally-induced back pain is a leading cause of reduced productivity in industry. Detecting when a worker is lifting incorrectly and at increased risk of back injury presents significant possible benefits. These include increased quality of life for the worker due to lower rates of back injury and fewer workers’ compensation claims and missed time for the employer. However, recognizing lifting risk provides a challenge due to typically small datasets and subtle underlying features in accelerometer and gyroscope data. A novel method to classify a lifting dataset using a 2D convolutional neural network (CNN) and no manual feature extraction is proposed in this paper; the dataset consisted of 10 subjects lifting at various relative distances from the body with 720 total trials. The proposed deep CNN displayed greater accuracy (90.6%) compared to an alternative CNN and multilayer perceptron (MLP). A deep CNN could be adapted to classify many other activities that traditionally pose greater challenges in industrial environments due to their size and complexity.


2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 455-486 ◽  
Author(s):  
John L. A. Huisman ◽  
Roeland van Hout ◽  
Asifa Majid

Abstract The human body is central to myriad metaphors, so studying the conceptualisation of the body itself is critical if we are to understand its broader use. One essential but understudied issue is whether languages differ in which body parts they single out for naming. This paper takes a multi-method approach to investigate body part nomenclature within a single language family. Using both a naming task (Study 1) and colouring-in task (Study 2) to collect data from six Japonic languages, we found that lexical similarity for body part terminology was notably differentiated within Japonic, and similar variation was evident in semantics too. Novel application of cluster analysis on naming data revealed a relatively flat hierarchical structure for parts of the face, whereas parts of the body were organised with deeper hierarchical structure. The colouring data revealed that bounded parts show more stability across languages than unbounded parts. Overall, the data reveal there is not a single universal conceptualisation of the body as is often assumed, and that in-depth, multi-method explorations of under-studied languages are urgently required.


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