Real time assessment of hand-arm vibration system based on capacitive MEMS accelerometers

摘要

Vibrations are a well known potential cause of health diseases and therefore constitute a main concernudfor the safety of workers in a large number of activities. In order to prevent health hazards, national andudinternational institutions have issued laws and directives which establish recommended limits to theudworkers’ exposure to vibrations during operations. Consequently, if the amount of adsorbed vibrationudexceeds the allowable daily limits the worker has to stop his job. Recent wireless sensing and communicatingudtechnologies can effectively be employed for such purpose, allowing to develop monitoring customizeduddevices at affordable cost which could be easily employed during the workers’ activity. Inudsuch context, the present research proposes an innovative system aimed at estimating the hand–armudexposure to vibration according to the Standard EN ISO 5349-1:2004. In particular the proposed systemudis based on Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) technology and involves the design of a compactudwearable unit to be attached to the waist of the operator and a fixed station for data storage and analysis.udThe paper reports the design of such a system and an experimental test performed on hand held shakersudcommonly employed for olive harvesting. The results highlight the opportunities offered by these emergingudtechnologies in developing intelligent devices to be included in the worker’s equipment which mightudsignificantly modify the current approach to safety management in the next future.