Quality Assurance for Operating Room Illumination through Lean Six Sigma

Since every mistake made in the healthcare industry can cause permanent harm or even death, some fundamental requirements should be considered when planning and designing operating rooms. Lighting is one of the most important ergonomic factors, especially for operating rooms. This paper investigates the integration of the lean approach and six sigma in measuring the efficiency of LED technology, which can also be regarded as a factor affecting the operating room efficiency. Measurement System Analysis (MSA) and Gage Control methods were applied to determine measurement variability in operating room illumination measurement process. Repeatability and reproducibility (%R&R) was found 12.89%. After calibration, %R&R value was found 8.21%, which implies that calibration helped reduce variability.

Utilization of Participatory Ergonomics for Workstation Evaluation Towards Productive Manufacturing

Principles of workstation configuration decrease work environment ergonomic hazards and improve worker’s productivity. The participatory ergonomics approach is one of the best methods for eliminating or upgrading manual tasks with the aim of reducing the occurrence of related occupational musculoskeletal issue. This study assesses the workstation of a foundry shop in terms of musculoskeletal occurrences and ergonomic hazards employing Ergonomic Symptom Survey, Illumination Measurement, Noise Measurement, and Postural Analysis using REBA and RULA. The molding area average lux reading of 97.12 was far below the recommended light levels set by the DOE. The production area produces unbearable noises. REBA and RULA results reveal that activities in the foundry shop are very risky and need immediate investigation and changes. In general, the workstation is not properly layout. Improvement of material handling equipment such as the use of trolleys, rolling shelves or belt conveyors lessen the transfer time from one process to another leading to reduction of the current production time. In most cases, maintaining health and safety practices provides a much better way for the production performance of the foundry shop as well as its workers.

Surface reconstruction based on the camera relative irradiance

Precise three-dimensional measurements of surfaces are significant in many fields. Usually, three-dimensional descriptions of the object surface have to be acquired by contact measure probe or other non-contact equipment. The paper proposed a novel surface reconstruction method that uses camera relative irradiance via the image gray-scale value information under fixed ring light. After calibrations of the measurement condition, just one image of the object is necessary to reconstruct the surface. The method mainly involves two aspects: the calibration process and the surface reconstruction process. The purpose of the calibration process is to find the relation between the image gray-scale value and the relative irradiance of the charge-coupled device sensor in different expose conditions. The surface reconstruction mainly focuses on the relation between the irradiance and height information. The experiment result shows the relative error of the illumination measurement result obtained using charge-coupled device camera is less than 2.91%. Reconstruction error is mainly result from the truncation error of algorithm calculation. An example is presented to verify the performance of this technique. The reconstruction experiments demonstrated that it can successfully measure the geometrical characteristics from the specified view of the object.

FPGA-Based High Precision Illumination Measurement System: A Prototype Development and Evaluation

The light is a most important natural resource for human to survive .Aiming at the shortcomings of the traditional light intensity measuring instrument ,a kind of high resolution illumination measurement system based on FPGA is designed ,which consists of special BH1750 light sensors and programmable logic gate array (FPGA) . A soft core Nios II is used as controller in the instrument, and BH1750 is put into use to acquire light signal .The testing results show that the design is feasible.

Intelligent Teaching-Building Lighting Control System Based on PLC

Aimed at energy-saving, an intelligent teaching building lighting control system based on PLC is designed. Keeping PLC as the core, the system consists of an illumination measurement module (for measuring the light intensity in classrooms), a statistic module (for counting students in classrooms), a human body existence detecting module (for identifying distribution zones of human bodies in classrooms), and an A/D conversion module. The hardware and main program of the system have been introduced respectively. By using the system, the lights can be turned on or off automatically according to the brightness, the students number and students location in classrooms. The system can also be changed into manually control mode for emergency of PLC fault or other special need.