Digital Human Modeling in Healthcare Systems: Overview,Opportunities, and Applications

摘要

Even though ergonomics plays an important role in ensuring a safe and productive workplace, the healthcare sectorhas historically had limited focus on workplace ergonomics. However, over the past few decades, there has been anincreased awareness of this field, with researchers exploring areas such as equipment/display design, back injuries,dentists’ cervicobrachial disorders, and ergonomic evaluation of surgical instruments and visual displays inoperating rooms. However, most of this research employed traditional ergonomic assessment techniques in usabilitylabs with human subjects, which can be time consuming, tedious, and expensive, due to the requirement ofcomplicated and expensive technologies (e.g., electromyography). Some of these disadvantages could be overcomeusing virtual environments and digital humans. Recently, digital human modeling has been widely used in themanufacturing, automobile, and aerospace industries, with very limited, if any, applications in the healthcare sector.This research endeavor explores a novel approach of ergonomic evaluation in healthcare using ‘Jack’, a digitalhuman modeling software. An overview of this technology and explores its opportunities and applications in thehealthcare domain is provided. The paper further demonstrates this capability through specific applications in theergonomic evaluation of patient lifting tasks, laparoscopic surgery, pharmacy layout, and sonographer workingpostures.