Ergonomic risk assessment of sea fishermen part I: Manual material handling

Abstract

Many epidemiological and questionnaire based studies reported that fishermen had a high incidence of musculoskeletal disorders. To our knowledge this is the first time that manual material handling tasks have been investigated aboard. We investigated several manual material handling tasks in sea fishermen by means of different tools: NIOSH revisited protocol, 3DSSPP and heart rate. We found LI between 2.77 and 6.34, while handling boxes from the boat to the truck, and between 1.63 and 5.83, while transferring boxes outside the cold storage on the boat. Furthermore 3DSSPP© analysis showed low/medium level of low back compression force but low strength capability at shoulder, hip and trunk level. Lastly heart rate measurement while handling crates from the ship deck to the cold storage and inside the cold storage showed a significant increase of heart rate respectively of 42.7 and 40.5 %. Results showed high values of risk for all the tasks investigated.