Novel method for quantitative assessment of physical workload of healthcare workers by a tetherless ergonomics workstation

Healthcare workers are at risk of physical injury. Our laboratory has developed a tetherless ergonomics workstation that is suitable for studying physicians´ and nurses´ physical workloads in clinical settings. The workstation uses wearable sensors to record multiple channels of body orientation and muscle activity and wirelessly transmits them to a base station laptop computer for display, storage, and analysis. The ergonomics workstation generates long records of multi-channel data, so it is desired that the workstation automatically process these records and provide graphical and quantitative summaries of the physical workloads experienced by the healthcare workers. This paper describes a novel method of automated quantitative assessment of physical workload, termed joint cumulative amplitude-duration (JCAD) analysis, that has advantages over previous methods and illustrates its use in a comparison of the physical workloads of robotically-assisted surgery versus manual video-endoscopic surgery.