Risk assessment for musculoskeletal disorders based on the characteristics of work posture

Construction workers are at high risk of work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WMSDs). Although the existing observational assessment methods are easy to use, when it comes to a more in-depth statistical analysis of the dynamic characteristics of the worker's operation, the sample data to be processed turn out to be large, the labor cost high, and the analysis easily affected by the prejudice of the evaluator. This study examines a novel WMSD prediction method based on the dynamic characteristics of the working posture, which comprises three artificial intelligence algorithms in series. In this method, the posture detector identifies the limb angles and state in the working video, the posture risk evaluator evaluates the risk level of the working posture frame by frame, and the task risk predictor predicts the risk level of the current work process. The collected video data of common tasks of construction workers and the MPII Human Pose dataset were used for training and evaluation of the algorithms. The method achieved 87.0% accuracy of the joint point recognition. The micro-averaged accuracy, recall, and F1-score (harmonic average of accuracy and recall) reached 96.7%, 96.0%, and 96.6%, respectively. The results showed that the proposed method has great potential for real-time risk assessment. It can output all of the changes of the limb angles of workers in the work process frame by frame and predict the risk level of the whole work process. [Display omitted] •An automated method based on vision recognition algorithms is proposed to monitor, evaluate, and predict work posture risks.•The method is composed of three AI algorithms in series (posture detector, posture risk assessor, and task risk predictor).•The method achieved 87.0% accuracy of joint point recognition and greater than 96.0% accuracy of posture risk prediction.•The method can identify and evaluate the WMSD risk level of the work posture in a work video frame by frame.•The risk level of the work process is predicted according to the extracted posture risk change characteristics.