A Musculoskeletal Reliability Model For Monitoring Core Body Movements Leading To Risk Evaluation In The Workplace

Injuries and illness in the workplace are commonplace. 41% of such incidents can be attributed to musculoskeletal injury (498,000 in the UK alone last year), and results in 6.9m workdays being lost in the UK every year across sectors including logistics, construction, aviation and agriculture. This is a cost that has to be shouldered by the employer and, in the EU and US alone, costs $50bn and €80bn respectively.

The primary form of risk management control is conducted through various types of training and assessment intended to reduce work related health incidents by identifying potential risks:

* The most common technique is manual handling training in a classroom setting, unfortunately that is often quickly forgotten.
* One-to-one coaching is much more effective but is very expensive.
* Task redesign/profiling is costly, fiddley and not well received by the workforce.
* Kinematic trackers can also be used to log movements, but are often considered obtrusive and become irritating after a short period of time

The founder of Soter Analytics has experience in the mining industry where he noted the dedicated care and attention that was given to specialist engineering equipment; regular maintenance and monitoring ensured optimal performance, output and longevity. He also observed that such care was not given to employees. Therefore, an innovative solution has been proposed to apply an holistic model based on the principle of '_Workforce Musculoskeletal Reliability'_. The system is geared towards a proactive not reactive behavioural change in workplace health, wellbeing and productivity with the SoterSpine kinematic tracker at the heart of human movement analysis.

Currently, there are no solutions able to continuously monitor a workforce with the intention of influencing their behaviour and predicting/reducing the likelihood of injury. This project intends to overcome these barriers as well as addressing any negative perceptions and rejections from the workforce. A series of work packages have been developed in line with the following goals:

**1\.**Research undefined movements

**2\.**Redesign and develop hardware for continuous operation, ease of use and enhanced experience.

**3\.**Research and address user perceptions of the system

**4\.**Predictively diagnose injury

**5\.**Improve productivity/output As a result of the above, businesses will see improvements in their productivity and output with a workforce that has enhanced physical and mental health. Staff retention levels will increase and the aforementioned lost days and associated business costs will fall -- our partners in case studies have seen a 55% drop.