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Frontiers of Engineering Management >> 2017, Volume 4, Issue 1 doi: 10.15302/J-FEM-2017004

Motion-based analysis for construction workers using biomechanical methods

1. Department of Building and Real Estate, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China; School of Civil Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150090, China
2. Department of Construction Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
3. Department of Building and Real Estate, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China
4. School of Civil Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150090, China

Accepted: 2017-03-24 Available online: 2017-04-19

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Abstract

Sustaining awkward postures and overexertion are common factors in construction industry that result in work-related injuries of workers. To address there safety and health issues, conventional observational methods on the external causes are tedious and subjective, while the direct measurement on the internal causes is intrusive leading to productivity reduction. Therefore, it is essential to construct an effective approach that maps the external and internal causes to realize the non-intrusive identification of safety and health risks. This research proposes a theoretical method to analyze the postures tracked by videos with biomechanical models. Through the biomechanical skeleton representation of human body, the workload and joint torques are rapidly and accurately evaluated based on the rotation angles of joints. The method is then demonstrated by two case studies about (1) plastering and (2) carrying. The experiment results illustrate the changing intramuscular torques across the construction activities in essence, validating the proposed approach to be effective in theory.

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