Representative job 'building for video analysis completed using the Utah ergonomic analyzer

Many ergonomists strive to find links between physical risk factors and injuries in the workplace. To accomplish this, workers are observed in the workplace as they complete their daily jobs and an analysis is performed in real time. An alternative to this type of analysis is to record the workers completing their jobs using video cameras and then later perform a more in depth analysis. Although video analysis provides many benefits, it can be very time consuming and quite monotonous. Some jobs take many hours, even multiple days to analyze using video analysis techniques. Therefore, in order to be more efficient and save time, the following method was tested. The method included analyzing one representative cycle of the elements that were completed many times throughout each job. Once the representative element was analyzed, it was used for each instance that the specific element occurred resulting in a "built job." This greatly reduced the time of analysis since the element was only analyzed one time rather than the multiple times that it occurred in the representative job cycle. This led to a substantial time savings while still obtaining a reliable analysis and representation of the job of interest. Two analytical methods were used to compare the data between the fully analyzed job and the built job. The first was a basic comparison of averages, standard deviations and percent differences. The second was an intraclass correlation coefficient.