Biomechanical injury assessment

There are two elements to acceptance evaluations i) user acceptance, ii) biomechanical injury assessment. Due to the nature of any defence equipment, user acceptance must be imequivocal to ensure that the LCS will be used in an appropriate manner. If iterative assessments have been undertaken, involving appropriate soldier representation, user acceptance issues should have been identified and addressed. Iterative evaluations, since they usually use SMEs, may not pick up all user acceptance issues, so some form of trialling involving junior ranks is recommended. Biomechanical assessments are needed to ensure that the potential for LCS to injme users is mitigated as much as is reasonably practicable and that it is an improvement over previous systems. 

Low-back injury is estimated to cost the U.S. industry tens of biUions annually through compensation claims, lost workdays, reduced productivity, and retraining needs (NIOSH 1997 Cats-Baril and Fry-moyer 1991 Frymoyer et al. 1983). Approximately 33% of aU workers compensation costs are for musculoskeletal disorders. Experience has shown that these injuries can be avoided with the proper ergonomic intervention. Biomechanical models available can be used for job analysis either proactively, during the design phase, or reactively in response to injury incidence, to help identify the injurious situations. The most common types of injury-assessment analyses performed using human models include low-back compression force analysis and strength analysis. 

Depending on the human performance tool, the postural information reqirired for an assessment may require a static posture at an instance in time, or multiple key postures at different times in the task. For example, the NIOSH lifting guide (NIOSH 1991) requires starting and ending postures of a lift to arrive at an assessment of the lift conditions. In contrast, analysis tools based on biomechanical models, such as low-back injury risk-assessment tools, can analyze loading conditions continuously for each posture throughout the simulation. 

The principal aim of impact biomechanics is the prevention of injury through environmental modification, such as the provision of an airbag for automotive occupants to protect them during a frontal crash. To achieve this aim effectively, it is necessary that workers in the field have a clear understanding of the mechanisms of injury, be able to describe the mechanical response of the tissues involved, have some basic information on human tolerance to impact, and be in possession of tools that can be used as human surrogates to assess a particular injury [Viano et al., 1989]. This chapter deals with the biomechanics of blunt impact injury to the head and neck. 

Newman, J., Beusenberg, M., Fournier, E. et al. 1999. A new biomechanical assessment of mild traumatic brain injury — part Iimethodology. In Proceedings of the 1999 International IRCOBI Conference on... 

Bass, C.R.D.R.K.S., Robert, Pulmonary Injury Risk Assessment for Short-Duration Blasts. University of Virginia, Center for Applied Biomechanics, 2006. 

In order to assess helmet design requirements, the armour designer must have a thorough and comprehensive understanding of head impact biomechanics. In the past, few were concerned about the biomechanics of helmeted head impact (Shuaeib et al, 2002). Therefore, the various biomechanical aspects of head injury will be reviewed in this section, with an emphasis on the head impact situations encountered, from typical motorcycle accidents to high-velocity impacts where helmets are generally used. 

Private corporations are employing individuals with biomechanical knowledge to perform employee fitness evaluations and to provide analyses of work environments and positions. Using these assessments, the biomechanics experts advise employers of any ergonomic changes or job modifications that will reduce the risk of workplace injury. 

Injury risk assessment is frequently used. It evaluates the probability of injury as a continuous function of a biomechanical response. A Legist function relates injury probability p to a biomechanical response X hy p(x) = [1 + expfet — where a and fi are parameters derived from statistical analysis... 

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