RESUMEN
In the last five years, the female labor force has increased rapidly in Saudi Arabia. This is due to the new government's vision to empower women. For many decades, Saudi females were excluded from working in certain fields due to cultural restrictions. Nowadays, Saudi women are not only joining the service workforce but are currently employed in more physically demanding careers, such as manufacturing and military jobs, which were previously dominated by males. It becomes necessary to design workplaces, tools, and equipment to safely accommodate the female physical attributes, which include body dimensions. This study presents the anthropometric measurements of Saudi Arabian adult females. In total, 504 female subjects aged 20-70 participated in the study. Thirty-eight body measurements, including weight and triceps skinfold, were taken in sitting and standing postures. The main contribution of this study is to provide a national anthropometric database of Saudi females, which is very limited, especially for females in the age groups under study. The availability of such data will allow foreign and local manufacturers to design usable and safe products and workspaces for a wide range of Saudi adult females. The findings reveal that there are no significant differences in the body dimensions of Saudi females across all age groups, except for stature height, eye height, chest depth, skinfold (mm), sitting height, buttock-knee length, and hip breadth. The study also reveals that Saudi females' body sizes are different from other Asian, Middle Eastern, and British nations, which invalidates the assumption of using other nations' body measurements to estimate Saudis' body measurements. Utilizing the supermarket cashier workstation to assess the appropriateness of commercial station fit for Saudi females' body dimensions, the results underscore the crucial role of anthropometric measurements in addressing differences between product design and the unique body dimensions of Saudi females. The identified anthropometric mismatch highlights potential risks, emphasizing the threat to the working safety of Saudi females. Moreover, the data can be used by health professionals as a base to evaluate the health of Saudi adult females. Descriptive statistics and extreme values are determined. The data are presented in standard anthropometric tables.
RESUMEN
Most daily tasks require exerting static grip strength which can be challenging for the elderly as their strength diminishes with age. Moreover, normative static grip strength data are important in ergonomics and clinical settings. The goal of this study is to present the gender, age-specific, hand-specific, and body-mass-index-specific handgrip strength reference of Saudi males and females in order to describe the population's occupational demand and to compare them with the international standards. The secondary objective is to investigate the effects of gender, age group, hand area, and body mass index on the grip strength. A sample of 297 (146 male and 151 female) volunteers aged between 18 and 70 with different occupations participated in the study. Grip strength data were collected using a Jamar dynamometer with standard test position, protocol, and instructions. The mean maximum voluntary grip strength values for males were 38.71 kg and 22.01 kg, respectively. There was a curvilinear relationship of grip strength to age; significant differences between genders, hand area, and some age groups; and a correlation to hand dimensions depending on the gender.
RESUMEN
One of the most challenging problems facing healthcare providers is to determine the actual cost for their procedures, which is important for internal accounting and price justification to insurers. The objective of this paper is to find suitable categories to identify the diagnostic outpatient medical procedures and translate them from functional orientation to process orientation. A hierarchal task tree is developed based on a classification schema of procedural activities. Each procedure is seen as a process consisting of a number of activities. This makes a powerful foundation for activity-based cost/management implementation and provides enough information to discover the value-added and non-value-added activities that assist in process improvement and eventually may lead to cost reduction. Work measurement techniques are used to identify the standard time of each activity at the lowest level of the task tree. A real case study at a private hospital is presented to demonstrate the proposed methodology.