Applied ergonomics
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Comparative Study
Risk factors associated with self-reported musculoskeletal pain among short and long distance industrial gas delivery truck drivers.
This study investigated and compared the associations between self-reported exposures to individual as well as work-related physical and psychosocial risk factors for musculoskeletal (MS) disorders and the prevalence of MS symptoms in different body areas among short- (P&D) and long-distance (Bulk delivery) truck drivers working for the same large gas delivery company in Canada. ⋯ Prevalence of MS pain was higher among industrial gas delivery truck drivers than in the general Quebec male worker population, and higher for Bulk drivers compared to P&D drivers. MS pain in Bulk drivers was mainly associated with psychosocial risk factors and lifestyle; MS pain in P&D drivers was mainly associated with physical risk factors.
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Very little is known about people's ability to localize sound under varying workload conditions, though it would be expected that increasing workload should degrade performance. A set of eight auditory clinical alarms already known to have relatively high localizability (the ease with which their location is identified) when tested alone were tested in six conditions where workload was varied. Participants were required to indicate the location of a series of alarms emanating at random from one of eight speaker locations. ⋯ The data does therefore demonstrate the typical pattern of increasing workload affecting a primary task in an area where there is little data. In addition, the data demonstrates that performance in the control condition results in a missed alarm on one in ten occurrences, whereas performance in the heaviest workload conditions results in a missed alarm on every fourth occurrence. This finding has implications for the understanding of both 'inattentional deafness' and 'alarm fatigue' in clinical environments.