Verve Motion, a Harvard University spinout dedicated to industrial worker safety, has officially published results from an extensive, multi-year study on wearable robotics in the workplace. According to certain reports, the stated study brings forth critical metrics related to back and hip injuries, while simultaneously educating us on substantial benefits for industrial workers using soft exosuit devices. The latter bit markedly includes a significant reduction in workplace injuries and enhanced worker well-being. More on the same would reveal how this research effort, which ran for four years, tracked ergonomics, safety, and injury metrics across more than 65 million lifts at over 40 sites in five different industries: Construction, Food & Beverage, Logistics, Manufacturing, and Retail. Markedly enough, it did so to generate and offer unprecedented insights into the impact of soft exosuits on physically demanding jobs where workers engage in rigorous, repetitive tasks, such as case picking, manufacturing, order picking, and shipping and receiving, tasks where workers lift between 10,000 and 60,000 pounds per day. The method used to reach upon these insights involved modeling the relevant metrics on Marras et al., a 1995 landmark study in ergonomics and occupational health that analyzed over 400 industrial lifting jobs and identified several variables (e.g., lifting frequency, the degree of forward bending, and twisting velocity) correlated with the risk of occupational-related lower back disorders.
Having referred to the initial bits and bobs, we now must turn our attention the new study’s results, beginning from high-risk sectors and movements. In essence, the researchers identified Food & Beverage, Logistics, and Retail sectors as having the most intense and least safe lifting activities, with employees averaging approximately 200 lifts per hour. Here, case picking was noted as the occupation with the highest lift rate, averaging 196 lifts per hour. Not just that, some sites were also found to exceed the mark of 300 lifts per hour. Anyway, more than 50% of these lifts involved deep lifts, with trunk flexion exceeding 40 degrees, and the heaviest loads exceeding 30,000 pounds per day on average. However, when they studied the wider sample size after embracing exosuits, it showed, for starters, a dramatic reduction in workplace injuries, ranging from 60 to 85% reduction per site. An example of the same would be how at one distribution center, which typically experienced one injury every 14,300 hours (roughly one out of seven full-time workers), the ongoing use of an exosuit resulted in just one injury every 94,000 hours.
Apart from proper injuries, the wearable robot further displayed an ability to reduce unsafe movements. In a concrete sense, the study discovered a 36% reduction in unsafe lifts among associates who wore the wearable for five months or longer. Alongside safety, the technology also showcased significant improvements in regards to productivity. You see, the consistent use of exosuits would result in an average productivity boost of 4.7%, with improvements ranging from 1.5% to 7.9% across the studied sites. On top of that, it also got worker productivity distribution to become significantly tighter. Among other things, the study revealed a positive overall workforce impact. This translates to how majority of users, almost 97%, reported that exosuits assisted in their work by generating strong positive sentiment (95%), reducing back muscle soreness (87%), causing less fatigue (79%), and increasing job satisfaction (95%).
To understand the significance of such a development, we must acknowledge that occupational back pain is currently the most common type of injury reported, affecting more than one million U.S. workers each year. From a financial standpoint, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration reports that the costs associated with back injury claims, including medical expenses and lost wages, range from $40,000 to $80,000 per incident.
