Objective Knee disorders, including osteoarthritis and knee replacement, are a growing problem for more and more workers due to increasing retirement ages. Aim is to describe work-related outcomes of possible knee replacement, meniscal surgery and other knee pain in a new large population cohort at its inception. Methods The CONSTANCES cohort is a randomly selected representative sample of French adults aged 18-69 years at recruitment. Participants completed symptom questionnaires, and surgery in the last 4 years period was collected from a national health claims database. Knee disorders were defined as severe or daily knee pain, or history of surgery for menis-cal tear or knee replacement. We considered several outcomes, including self-reported functional limitations (climbing stairs, walk 1 km, carrying 5 kg), task modifications and current work status. Multinomial logistic models were built separately for men and women; only variables with an Odds Ratio >2 (or <0.5) at p<0.001 were considered significant after adjustment for other relevant variables. Results Of 85.826 participants, of whom 38.571 (44.9%) reported knee pain. 10.683 (12.4%) reported severe knee pain, 1305 (1.5%) with meniscal tear surgery, and 403 (0.5%) with knee replacement. All limitations considered were significantly associated with severe knee pain, meniscus surgery and knee replacements among men and women, such as task modification for knee disorders. Loss of activity was only significantly associated with knee replacement among men. Conclusions Based on a cross-sectional design at this time, theses first analyses reported a poor outcomes of knee disorders for work-related activities.

In this paper, the design and control of a robotic device intended to stabilize the head and neck of a trauma patient during transport are presented. When transporting a patient who has suffered a traumatic head injury, the first action performed by paramedics is typically to restrain and stabilize the head and cervical spine of a patient. The proposed device would drastically reduce the time required to perform this action while also freeing a first responder to perform other possibly lifesaving actions. The applications for robotic casualty extraction are additionally explored. The design and construction are described, followed by control simulations demonstrating the improved behavior of the chosen controller paradigm, linear active disturbance rejection control (LADRC). Finally, experimental validation is presented, followed by future work and directions for the research.

This paper systematically describes the design and validation of a feasible control scheme for a robotic head stabilization system. Over the past few decades there has been a growing need for robotic systems to perform human rescue operations in the event of natural or manmade disasters. Before autonomous or remotely controlled robotic victim extraction can be realized, support systems with the capability to secure the head of a trauma victim in a manner that does not exacerbate existing spinal injuries needs to be developed. The paper starts with a brief description of one such previously developed robotic head stabilization system and examines the various functional requirements from a design and control standpoint. Detailed dynamic analysis of the system is done based on which a force control scheme involving Series Elastic Actuators (SEA) is proposed. The proposed control scheme is then tested on an ADAMS-MATLAB co-simulation where the dynamic head support system is modelled in ADAMS and the force controller in Simulink. Based on the results of the simulation, a physical prototype is integrated and the proposed control scheme is validated through experiments. The results of the simulation and experiment are analyzed, and improvements to the system are proposed for future experimentation. Based on the results of the simulation and experiments, the proposed control was found to successfully meet the desired control metrics in providing accurate force control for the head support device. The paper ends with a discussion on possible modifications to the overall system for it to be used in field robotic rescue.

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