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The pandemic COVID-19 has caused a rupture and disturbance in many ecosystems, especially in healthcare.  Although previously patients were treated and given first-hand treatment especially during life threatening event, currently, the safety of healthcare workers have also become the utmost priority.  Due to the nature of COVID-19 virus that is able to spread easily via respiratory droplets and aerosols, using mouth and eyes as the route of entry, healthcare workers need to protect themselves while saving the patients at the same time. Therefore, the most common lifesaving procedure at accident and emergency department was chosen, i.e. the intubation procedure. The aerosol box is introduced and used widely during the intubation procedure, especially in accident and emergency department.  The study has three objectives. First, to determine whether the aerosol box can provide protection to its users, secondly to suggest an improvement based on the current design of the aerosol box and thirdly to determine the risk of musculoskeletal injuries among healthcare workers using Rapid Entire Body Assessment (REBA). In this study, direct observation was made during the assessment before suggesting the required recommendation on how to improve the existing aerosol box. The first objective was achieved by conducting a direct observation when participants were conducting the intubation procedure. Any possibility of participants getting exposed to the risk of COVID-19 due to the failure of the box in guarding, was noted by the observer. Recommendation for improvement was made based on these findings, and served the second objective of the study. To achieve the third objective, ergonomics assessment using Rapid Entire Body Assessment (REBA) was conducted. REBA scores represent the severity of musculoskeletal risk imposed to healthcare workers during intubation procedure. Two participants took part in the study voluntarily. Results showed that the aerosol box used in this study does not protect healthcare workers from COVID-19. The current design of aerosol box used must be improvised in order to increase its effectiveness.  As for body postures, REBA scores were between medium and high, thus it required immediate corrective actions. With modification, the aerosol box may better protect healthcare workers from being exposed to the COVID-19 virus.

Accident and Emergency Department serves as the front line in any hospitals. Here, patients are triage according to the severity of illness before being send to respective zone, green, yellow or red. This study focuses on red zone of accident and emergency department with an objective to assesses the physical condition at accident and emergency department and suggest engineering recommendation to solve the problems found during the assessment. The study is conducted at one of Malaysian hospital, after the ethical has been obtained. During the assessment, lighting at the red zone, monitor height, bed area and body postures of two procedures are assessed and recorded. Results is compared with existing guidelines and suggestions are made on how to overcome the problem identified.

Repetitive workload may cause fatigue and contributed to most cases of workplace related ergonomics injuries in the industries. The purpose of this study is to investigate the physiological responses induced by the repetitive lifting activities based on in the Malaysia construction workers being exposed under high heat and the relative humidity. To achieve the objectives, three male workers participated in this experiments. There were repeated experimental based on the Design of Experiments procedure simulated under environmental temperature (32°C and 25°C) and repetitive lifting task (15 min). The physiological responses measured where the heart rate (HR) and maximum oxygen consumption (VO2max). The experiments were conducted in a thermal climate simulation chamber and the parameters were set-up based on the real working environment. The results showed that the subjects highly experiencing fatigue when they were exposed to high temperature at 32°C. These phenomena were determined through their HR and VO2max, which were increased gradually under prolonged environment exposure. This study found that the significant heat stress increased the workload intensity in repetitive lifting tasks significantly correlated with the physiological responses of the subjects represented through the HR and VO2max. The study concluded the need of management to reconsider the impact of work environmental temperature and relative humidity to their workers especially to those work under tropical climate.