Assessment and analysis of work related musculoskeletal disorders amongoccupational laundry shop workers

Abstract

Laundry shop is one of the small-scale occupational sectors, where a large variety of clothes are ironed daily using charcoal iron box. People do ironing as a business of their own, and if required, people are employed on the basis of daily or weekly wages. Both males and female employees are involved in the ironing process. In India, around 80% of people approach laundry shops for their clothes to be ironed. A huge occupational activity is involved in ironing process, which demands a lot of muscular power resulting in higher muscular fatigue, body pain and musculoskeletal injury. As aresult, this reduces the efficiency of workers and increases the level of musculoskeletal risk. The ironing process consists of spreading the clothes on the ironing table, lifting the iron box, ironing the cloth on all the extreme ends, folding the cloth during ironing and finally the ironed cloth has to be placed separately. The impact of work stress upon the workers during the ironing task in occupational laundry shops is found to be high as the clothes are ironed in a mass quantity for a prolonged period of time. In the present research, the amount of risk influencing the workrelated usculo-skeletal Disorders (wMSD) among the ironing workers in the occupational laundry shops is assessed through three different methods. The initial method involves a survey among ironing workers using a modified and standardised questionnaire, the second method is Rapid Entire Body Assessment (REBA), and finally, the third method is the assessment of muscle activity by using surface Electromyography (sEMG) sensing device. The study focusesmainly on the occupational ironing workers in various laundry shopslocated in and around Erode City, Tamil Nadu, India, where the total population of ironing workers is 300. newline