| Work-related Musculoskeletal Disorders (WMSDs) are common in working areas, and impact the health of the working population in several industries. The influence of WMSDs can lead to injuries to the soft tissues of human bodies, including muscles, tendons, ligaments, and nerves. This study will use digital human modeling (DHM) to simulate patient lifting tasks. The manual lifting technique selected is the under-arm lift. The main objective of this study is to minimize the risk of obtaining low back disorders (LBDs) for clinical staff during patient lifting. In patient manual lifting scenarios in particular, environmental settings are difficult to establish. Meanwhile, DHM software provides a dynamic simulation platform for performing patient handling/lifting work. Therefore, the difficulty of performing this experiment has become one of the motivations for the author to use DHM software to assess the patient handling/lifting task.;Furthermore, this study uses Jack 7.1 software to simulate the Under-arm lifting technique. In this experiment, clinical staff's gender, weight, and height, as well as patients' weight and height, were used as independent variables. Meanwhile, lower back compression forces, comfort assessment, Ovako Working Posture Analysis (OWAS), Rapid Upper Limb Assessment (RULA) were used as the dependent variables. Additionally, an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) was applied to build a learning structure to predict low back compression force (LBCF) values in a more comprehensive range in the future. From the perspective of LBCF, the male clinical staff obtained smaller values than the female clinical staff. However, 50% of males, 50% of females and 95% of females may obtain severe back pain during the under-arm lifting technique. Clinical Staff Weight and Height (CSWH) and Patient Weight and Height (PWH) are the most influential factors, while Clinical Staff Gender (CSG) only slightly affected the LBCF values. From the Comfort Assessment (CA) perspective, trunk thighs, knees, and foot calves are the most uncomfortable areas. Furthermore, several other human parts may experience discomfort in specific CSWH. OWAS provided an equal score of 3 for all experimental scenarios indicating the need for performing corrective measures to avoid WMSDs. OWAS provided evidence of the risk involved in manual lifting activities. Similarly, RULA provided scores based on postures and the working environment. Female clinical staff obtained better scores than the males. |
