A novel vision-based real-time method for evaluating postural risk factors associated with musculoskeletal disorders

Real-time risk assessment for work-related musculoskeletal disorders (MSD) has been a challenging research problem. Previous methods such as using depth cameras suffered from limited visual range and wearable sensors could cause intrusiveness to the workers, both of which are less feasible for long-run on-site applications. This document examines a novel end-to-end implementation of a deep learning-based algorithm for rapid upper limb assessment (RULA). The algorithm takes normal RGB images as input and outputs the RULA action level, which is a further division of RULA grand score. Lifting postures collected in laboratory and posture data from Human 3.6 (a public human pose dataset) were used for training and evaluating the algorithm. Overall, the algorithm achieved 93% accuracy and 29 frames per second efficiency for detecting the RULA action level. The results also indicate that using data augmentation (a strategy to diversify the training data) can significantly improve the robustness of the model. The proposed method demonstrates its high potential for real-time on-site risk assessment for the prevention of work-related MSD. A demo video can be found at https://github.com/LLDavid/RULA_2DImage.