Postural Assessment of Three Wood Measurement Options by the OWAS Method: Digital Solutions Seem to Be Better

Abstract

Ergonomic assessment and validation are important in designing sustainable forest operations. Measurement and grading play a central role in the wood supply chain and updated solutions have started to emerge for such activities. Procuring biometric data by mobile scanning platforms has been shown to have a high potential in replacing traditional wood measurement methods, but no assessments were carried out to see if these solutions are sustainable from an ergonomics point of view. Based on more than 63 k still images, this study evaluates the working postures of three measurement options, namely, traditional measurement, scanning by a smartphone, and scanning by a commercial laser scanner. The OWAS method was used as an assessment framework to compute the postural risk indexes. A correspondence analysis was implemented to explore the association between the studied work tasks and severity of exposure, and the postural similarity of tasks was evaluated by the Canberra metric. The use of digital measurement solutions seems to be better from a postural point of view since their risk indexes were well below 200. In contrast, traditional wood measurement tasks produced postural risk indexes that were close to 250. By considering the body components, digital measurement solutions seemed to indicate a distinct postural profile. Moreover, the digital solutions stood well apart in the range of the first two action categories, indicating no urgent need for postural improvement, which was not the case for manual measurements. The main conclusion of the study is that state-of-the-art digital solutions are better from a postural point of view. For full validation, population-level studies should be carried out.

Forestry Ergonomics Publications in the Last Decade: A Review

“…Harvesting operations were the most represented in this review, followed by wood extraction and pre-harvesting operations, all of which total 84% of all records in this category of classification. As expected, the most records in harvesting (16), wood extraction (13), and pre-harvesting (6) were noted in Brazilian articles (Figure A1). Other countries with five or more records in harvesting operations include Italy, Poland, and Romania.…”

“…Manual work and tools are generally tied to measuring and managing operations in forestry [13,16,59,90] where workload and postural load were assessed. They are also involved in pre-harvesting and harvesting [15], e.g., postural load during manual cultivation and assistance with a wooden stick to help direct the felling; and wood extraction [15,48], e.g., MSD occurrence and workload while sorting small logs and manual loading, respectively.…”

“…Classification of articles by the risk factor category yielded 157 records in 15 fields (Figure 6). The most represented machines and tools were chainsaw (37), skidder (17), pre-harvesting tools (16), harvester (14), forwarder (12), and farm tractor (12). Overall, almost onethird of all records were noted in Brazilian articles (Figure A2) where the most records were observed for skidder (8), feller buncher (7), harvester (6), pre-harvesting tools (6), chainsaw (5), and forwarder (5).…”