Re-thinking of Floor Mat Design from an Ergonomic Perspective

My Role/Contribution:

- Evaluated the new design of rubber mat as consulting service provided to Milliken.
- Led and trained a team of four graduate students on data collection (using wireless EMG and Lumbar Motion Monitor) and data analysis (using MATLAB and SAS).
- Generated the final report with biomechanical data and relevant charts.

Mat Handling Tasks

Experimental Design

Research Participants

Apparatus

Lumbar Motion Monitor

Dependent measures

Muscle activation level in erectors spinae and anterior deltoids
- 90th percentile
- Average x Duration
Lumbar: peak flexion, lateral bending and twist
- degrees,
- velocity,
- acceleration
Task duration

Wireless EMG

Data Collection

As a senior graduate student, I coordinated and scheduled 14 experiment sessions. Each session requires 4 researchers and 1 participant and lasts about 2 hours.

Trained the new graduate students to use LMM and EMG.
Helped with the experiment set up and problem solving.

Data Analysis and Report

Prepared the MATLAB program for data analysis.
Taught the students about the data analysis procedure and assigned the tasks.
Collected and further looked into the result using statistical analysis (SAS)

Project finding

Across mat sizes and textile orientations, the new design required significantly reduced the peak exertions required of the low back and shoulder muscles.

2. Looking across mat size and textile orientation, the new design took about 1.2 seconds longer to deploy.

* Detailed result can be found in the article:

Wang, X., Bigelow, S., Seagren, K. E., Preddie, A. K., Wang, Z., Ardiyanto, A., ... & Lavender, S. A. (2018). Re-thinking floor mat design from an ergonomics perspective: Can a two-part mat system reduce biomechanical loads during normal mat handling tasks?. Applied ergonomics, 72, 17-24.