International Pesticide Operator Safety Meeting 2021: hand-held application scenarios in low- and middle-income countries

An international web meeting on the topic of operator safety for pesticide operators was held on 20–21 September 2021. The meeting provided an opportunity for experts from regulatory agencies, pesticide industry, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and other organizations to discuss operator safety in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC). The meeting focused on risk assessment and risk mitigation, the first steps to address operator safety. The key message at the meeting was the need for an operator exposure model that includes common hand-held scenarios used in LMIC and consistent personal protective equipment communication. The experts supported a transparent collaborative process that will enable us to build on the past efforts.

Operator workload analysis on coconut tree climbing using portable coconut climbing equipment

Recently, the work of climbing coconuts, especially in Aceh Province Indonesia still uses traditional methods, namely by climbing coconut trees directly. Traditional climbing is very high risk because it can fall which threatens the safety of life. Besides that, this job is also a heavy work category because it requires a lot of energy to do it. Therefore, the analysis of operator workload on climbing coconut trees using portable coconut climbing equipment is expected to be useful for developing tool designs and methods for climbing coconuts that are safer, more comfortable and more effective. The calculation of the operator’s workload is based on heart rate measurements, where three operators have their heart rate data taken during coconut tree climbing activities, either manually or using portable climbing tools. The workloads analyzed are qualitative and quantitative workloads. The results of the workload analysis indicate that climbing is traditionally classified as a “medium” job with an average IRHR value of 1.45, while using portable climbing equipment is classified as heavy work with an IRHR value of 1.54 The traditional climbing energy consumption rate is 3.29 kcal/hour.kg-ow (kilocalories per hour per operator’s weight), while using a portable climbing equipment is 3.82 kcal/hour.kg-ow. The high level of operator workload is largely determined by the operator’s habits in doing climbing as well as skills that must be trained in operating the tool. However, in terms of operator safety, the use of portable equipment has a higher level of security because there are footrests and handrails as well as seat belts.

Turning stability analysis of a 12-kW self-propelled riding-type automatic onion transplanter to ensure user safety

The lateral turning stability analysis of the self-propelled riding-type upland crop machinery is an important issue as the cultivation lands are usually uneven, and cause severe work-related injuries, even death. In this study, the lateral turning stability of a 12-kW self-propelled riding-type automatic onion transplanter was analyzed for ensuring the operator’s safety during transplanting operation. To evaluate turning stability, the center of gravity (CG) of the developed onion transplanter was determined theoretically. Then, a simulation was carried out to identify the lateral turning stability angles using the RecurDyn software, and the results were validated through tests. Rollover angles in the loaded and unloaded conditions were also checked. The statistical significance of the replications was determined by a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA). According to the physical dimensions of the onion transplanter, the mathematical rollover angle was 34.5°. The average simulated rollover angles were 43.9°. Due to the symmetrical structure, a 4.5° turning difference was observed between the right and left side turning, and a 3° angle difference was occurred due to the variation of load conditions. The rollover angles fulfilled the ISO (International Organization for Standardization) standard. The findings of this study would be helpful for the manufacturers to ensure operator safety during the upland crop machinery operation in uneven and sloped lands.

Risk Assessment and Deployment for Safety Showers and Eyewash Stations in the Process Plant Industry

Safety showers and eyewash stations are equipment used for primary washing if their operator is exposed to hazardous chemicals. Therefore, safety showers and eyewash stations should be installed to ensure operator safety in process plants with excessive hazardous chemicals. International guidelines related to safety showers and eyewash stations are introduced in ANSI Z358.1, BS EN 15154, and German DIN 12899-3:2009, but only mechanical specifications regarding safety showers and eyewash stations are suggested. As such, there are currently no engineering guidelines, books, or technical journal papers requiring safety showers or eyewash stations and their efficient deployment. Thus, this study conducted risk assessment from an industrial hygiene perspective, suggesting which process equipment requires a safety shower and eyewash, including their economical and efficient deployment for operator safety. In industry, safety showers and eyewash stations are considered part of the process safety field; this study attempted to contribute to the safety improvement of operators by applying risk assessment of the industrial hygiene field. More studies are needed that contribute to operators’ safety by incorporating industrial hygiene fields for other process safety fields, including safety showers and eyewash stations.

Heat Inactivation of Clinical COVID-19 Samples on an Industrial Scale for Low Risk and Efficient High-throughput qRT-PCR Diagnostic Testing

We report the development of a large scale process for heat inactivation of clinical COVID-19 samples prior to laboratory processing for detection of SARS-CoV-2 by RT-qPCR. With more than 120 million confirmed cases, over 3.8 million deaths already recorded at the time of writing, COVID-19 continues to spread in many parts of the world. Consequently, mass testing for SARS-CoV-2 will remain at the forefront of the COVID-19 response and prevention for the near future. Due to biosafety considerations the standard testing process requires a significant amount of manual handling of patient samples within calibrated microbiological safety cabinets. This makes the process expensive, effects operator ergonomics and restricts testing to higher containment level laboratories. We have successfully modified the process by using industrial catering ovens for bulk heat inactivation of oropharyngeal/nasopharyngeal swab samples within their secondary containment packaging before processing in the lab to enable all subsequent activities to be performed in the open laboratory. As part of a validation process, we tested greater than 1200 clinical COVID-19 samples and showed less than 1 Cq loss in RT-qPCR test sensitivity. We also demonstrate the bulk heat inactivation protocol inactivates a murine surrogate of human SARS-CoV-2. Using bulk heat inactivation, the assay is no longer reliant on containment level 2 facilities and practices, which reduces cost, improves operator safety and ergonomics and makes the process scalable. In addition, heating as the sole method of virus inactivation is ideally suited to streamlined and more rapid workflows such as ‘direct to PCR’ assays that do not involve RNA extraction or chemical neutralisation methods.

Adaptive Obstacle Avoidance for a Class of Collaborative Robots

In a human–robot collaboration scenario, operator safety is the main problem and must be guaranteed under all conditions. Collision avoidance control techniques are essential to improve operator safety and robot flexibility by preventing impacts that can occur between the robot and humans or with objects inadvertently left within the operational workspace. On this basis, collision avoidance algorithms for moving obstacles are presented in this paper: inspired by algorithms already developed by the authors for planar manipulators, algorithms are adapted for the 6-DOF collaborative manipulators by Universal Robots, and some new contributions are introduced. First, in this work, the safety region wrapping each link of the manipulator assumes a cylindrical shape whose radius varies according to the speed of the colliding obstacle, so that dynamical obstacles are avoided with increased safety regions in order to reduce the risk, whereas fixed obstacles allow us to use smaller safety regions, facilitating the motion of the robot. In addition, three different modalities for the collision avoidance control law are proposed, which differ in the type of motion admitted for the perturbation of the end-effector: the general mode allows for a 6-DOF perturbation, but restrictions can be imposed on the orientation part of the avoidance motion using 4-DOF or 3-DOF modes. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the control strategy, simulations with dynamic and fixed obstacles are presented and discussed. Simulations are also used to estimate the required computational effort in order to verify the transferability to a real system.

ECMO Support and Operator Safety in the Context of COVID-19 Outbreak: A Regional Center Experience

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 emergency, the referral Intensive Care Unit for the Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) support of Piedmont Region (Italy), in cooperation with infectious disease specialists, perfusionists and cardiac surgeons, developed a protocol to guarantee operator safety during invasive procedures, among which the ECMO positioning or inter-hospital transport. The use of powered air-purifying respirators, filtering facepiece particles (FFP) 2–3 masks, protective suits, disposable sterile surgical gowns, and two pairs of sterile gloves as a part of a protocol seemed effective and feasible for trained healthcare workers and allow all the complex activities connected with the positioning of the ECMO support to be completed effectively. The simulation training on donning and doffing procedures and the presence of a dedicated team member to verify the compliance with the safety procedure effectively reassured operators and likely reduced the risk of self-contamination. From 1 March to 31 December 2020, we used the procedure in 35 severe acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) patients and one acute respiratory failure caused by neoplastic total tracheal obstruction, all positive to COVID-19, to be connected to veno-venous ECMO in peripheral hospitals and centralized for ECMO management. This preliminary experience seems to confirm that the use of ECMO during COVID-19 outbreaks is feasible and the risks associated with its positioning and management are sustainable for the health-care workers and safe for patients.

Preliminary morpho-structural analyses of the summit craters of Etna, in the last 4 Years, based on data extracted through SfM technique

<p>Morphological changes of the summit craters of active volcanoes are of pivotal interest in volcano monitoring because they could be the consequences of volcanic activities and represent the prelude of dangerous events.<br>Several methodologies have been used during the years in the volcanological monitoring, starting from ground measurements and remote sensing techniques such as aerial observation and satellite data analysis.  However, in the last decade UAVs have emerged in monitoring active volcanoes. In fact, they represent tools of indisputable value due to their relatively low cost, speed in mission planning, repeatability of surveys for data acquisition and increased operator safety.<br>During the last 4 Years we performed 15 UAVs surveys and 3 from helicopter to monitor the four summit craters of ETNA. The acquired data have been processed through structure-from-motion photogrammetric software to extract DEMs and orthomosaics with resolution ranging between 5 and 20 cm. A multi-temporal comparison of the extracted data has been successively performed on a GIS platform with the final aims of performing morpho-structural analyses of Etna summit craters, identifying areas of structural weakness, that could indicate areas of possible lateral collapses, and computing volume balances between gained and lost volumes.<br>The presented elaborations could help to quantify the hazard related to Etna summit eruptive activity and to mitigate the risk on an area visited by several tourists, especially in summer time.</p>

Gallium-68: Radiolabeling of Radiopharmaceuticals for PET Imaging - A Lot to Consider

Gallium-68 was applied for positron emission tomography (PET) imaging already in the early beginnings of PET imaging. Today, with the introduction of PSMA-targeting tracers (e.g. PSMA-11, PSMA-617, and PSMA-I&T), the number of clinical applications of 68Ga-radiopharmaceuticals for diagnostic imaging has grown considerably. This development was initiated and supported already in the mid-2000s by the commercial availability of 68Ge/68Ga generators designed for clinical usage. This progression was accompanied by the development of several purification methods to generator eluate as well as sophisticated 68Ga-radiopharmaceuticals. Due to the 68Ga-rush, the need for implementation of gallium-68 (depending on production route) and its certain tracers into the pharmacopeia increased. Based on the specifications given by the pharmacopeia, interest focused on the development of automated synthesis systems, 99mTc-analog kits with regard to patient as well as operator safety.

Biosignal-Based Attention Monitoring to Support Nuclear Operator Safety-Relevant Tasks

In the main control room (MCR) of a nuclear power plant (NPP), the quality of an operator's performance can depend on their level of attention to the task. Insufficient operator attention accounted for more than 26% of the total causes of human errors and is the highest category for errors. It is therefore necessary to check whether operators are sufficiently attentive either as supervisors or peers during reactor operation. Recently, digital control technologies have been introduced to the operating environment of an NPP MCR. These upgrades are expected to enhance plant and operator performance. At the same time, because personal computers are used in the advanced MCR, the operators perform more cognitive works than physical work. However, operators may not consciously check fellow operators' attention in this environment indicating potentially higher importance of the role of operator attention. Therefore, remote measurement of an operator's attention in real time would be a useful tool, providing feedback to supervisors. The objective of this study is to investigate the development of quantitative indicators that can identify an operator's attention, to diagnose or detect a lack of operator attention thus preventing potential human errors in advanced MCRs. To establish a robust baseline of operator attention, this study used two of the widely used biosignals: electroencephalography (EEG) and eye movement. We designed an experiment to collect EEG and eye movements of the subjects who were monitoring and diagnosing nuclear operator safety-relevant tasks. There was a statistically significant difference between biosignals with and without appropriate attention. Furthermore, an average classification accuracy of about 90% was obtained by the k-nearest neighbors and support vector machine classifiers with a few EEG and eye movements features. Potential applications of EEG and eye movement measures in monitoring and diagnosis tasks in an NPP MCR are also discussed.