Isometric push and pull strengths of agricultural workers from Northeast India

In agricultural farming operations, the incompatibility between operators' physical capability and labor demands in the operation of tools and equipment results in a decreased performance, productivity, and safety related measures.

The aim of this study was to collect a biomechanical database of push/pull strengths for initiating the development of a human-centered design of equipment that is not available for the intended user group, i.e. Nagaland.

The sample consisted of 399 male and 271 female agricultural workers from the five districts of Nagaland, aged 18 to 65 years, classified into three age groups. In the process of push and pull force measurements, the elbow angle of the participants were set to 30-120°, 120-130°, and 130-180°. All tests were performed in triplicates with a resting period of two minutes between every consequent recording.

The results showed that isometric push and pull strength values (Mean±SD) for males were 18.91±4.67 kg and 17.98±3.97 kg respectively and 13.07±4.06 kg and 11.98±3.33 kg for females respectively. The results of independent samples from student's t-test demonstrate that there was a substantial variance in the isometric push and pull strength values (p < 0.05) between the genders across the various age spectrum.

With ageing, muscular strength for push-pull strength in males and females reduce. The study reports that the recommended value of male and female isometric push-pull strength for agricultural workers of Nagaland should be 5th percentile of female data i.e. 6.40 and 1.71 kg respectively.