A method for evaluating the biomechanical stresses resulting from manual materials handling jobs

Manual materials handling tasks are inherent to many different jobs in industry today. The performance of such tasks exposes the worker to a variety of biomechanical hazards. This paper proposes a formalized algorithm for evaluating such hazards, and demonstrates the use of the algorithm in four different jobs. Medical data from these jobs are presented which serve to confirm the types of biomechanical stresses quantified by the biomechanical evaluations.