A Work-Related Musculoskeletal Disorders (WMSDs) Risk-Assessment System Using a Single-View Pose Estimation Model.

Musculoskeletal disorders are an unavoidable occupational health problem. In particular, workers who perform repetitive tasks onsite in the manufacturing industry suffer from musculoskeletal problems. In this paper, we propose a system that evaluates the posture of workers in the manufacturing industry with single-view 3D human pose-estimation that can estimate the posture in 3D using an RGB camera that can easily acquire the posture of a worker in a complex workplace. The proposed system builds a Duckyang-Auto Worker Health Safety Environment (DyWHSE), a manufacturing-industry-specific dataset, to estimate the wrist pose evaluated by the Rapid Limb Upper Assessment (RULA). Additionally, we evaluate the quality of the built DyWHSE dataset using the Human3.6M dataset, and the applicability of the proposed system is verified by comparing it with the evaluation results of the experts. The proposed system provides quantitative assessment guidance for working posture risk assessment, assisting the continuous posture assessment of workers.

First-order depinning transition of a driven interface in disordered media.

We introduce a simple growth model which exhibits a first-order pinning-depinning (PD) transition in disordered media. In our model, a first-order PD transition is triggered by the local inertia force F(l)=pLv macro where p denotes a constant between 0 and 1, L is the system size, and v macro is the average velocity in a local region of the growing interface. If pp(c), our model shows a first-order PD transition. We measure the critical exponents characterizing the dynamical behavior of our model and explain how a first-order PD transition can occur if p>p(c). Besides the PD transitions, our model exhibits another phase transition from a fluctuating to a nonfluctuating interface with a constant velocity.