Must Read Report: Tackling Musculoskeletal Disorders in Industrial Sectors with Emerging Technologies

Safetytech Accelerator has published a phenomenal 16-page report on the financial cost of worker injuries and the new ergonomic solutions, including exoskeletons, that are trying to tackle them. This is an easy-to-read but full-of-information, free publication organized with financial support from the National Safety Council (NSF). ExR Perspective: As a former manufacturing engineer, I rank this as an essential reading for any manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, or production specialist or leader. The report is based on 94 companies, including SUITX by Ottobock, HeroWear and Verve Motion.

The full report, Tackling MSD in Industrial Sectors with Emerging Tech, can be easily downloaded from the Safetytech Accelerator Website: link.

Key Insights:

• Page 5: The entire page is dedicated to the cost of business due to musculoskeletal injuries, with data from 10 leading organizations. “The total economic costs attributable to MSDs could be in the region of $1 trillion a year” (roughly $31,700 per second).
• Page 6: A report by EU workers on MSDs divided into backache, upper limb, and lower limb. Interestingly, mining reports higher upper limb injuries, while human health and social services are evenly split.
• Page 8: Between AI, Computer Vision, Data Analytics, Robotics, and Wearables, Exoskeleton Technology has the least investment funding (ExR Perspective: this should come as no surprise to any of our readers, but it is good to see it tabulated and graphed out).
• Page 9: Compares all emerging ergonomic solution technology regarding solution maturity and market interest. It is interesting to see where exoskeletons place compared to the rest.
• Page 10: Lists the reported benefits of emerging technologies. It shows both generally accepted values and ones that are yet to be widely accepted. For example, improvements in quality with vs. without using an exoskeleton are challenging to isolate and quantify, and only the work by ExoWorkAthlon for welding tasks comes to mind as an exception.

Don’t hesitate to review the report for yourself!