MākuSafe Launches Motion Explorer Aimed At Musculoskeletal Disorders (MSDs) and Repetitive Motion Injuries
November 15, 2021
MākuSafe announced the launch of a game-changing new feature in its EHS analytics software today. The new feature, Motion Explorer, will provide safety professionals, ergonomists, and risk managers with the data they need to uncover potential hazardous motion issues among workers before they become serious injuries. Hazardous motion and ergonomic injuries, like Musculoskeletal Disorders (MSDs) have been highlighted in recent headlines. MSD’s are both common and costly. In fact, MSDs are the single largest category of workplace injuries and are responsible for almost 30 percent of all workers’ compensation costs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Motion Explorer provides the data companies need to better understand and evaluate motions and take corrective action before an injury causes a worker to seek medical attention or lose days of work.
Visualize Worker Effort Expended Over Time
Motion Explorer was born out of MākuSafe’s desire to study hazardous repetitive and high-force motions over time. Motion Explorer allows for both of these in a highly visual and interactive way that is both easy-to-understand and actionable. Algorithmically, the new tool is able to deduce the intensity of a worker’s effort expended and arrive at conclusions about the level of potential impact on them for each day. The worker is then ranked and their physicality is compared against other workers. This is accompanied by a list of contributing indicators and data, including types of movement, where it happened and when it happened.
Easily Compare Multiple Data Sets
Motion Explorer, like the rest of the MākuSmart dashboard, enables filtering so it becomes easy to see data points such as:
- Overall physicality of an individual worker or group of workers by role
- Which workers rank highest in terms of effort expended
- How they compare to others, who for example, may do the same job.
MākuSafe gathers data important to understanding risks before incidents occur, all with a high degree of concern for worker privacy not collecting anything personal or biometric.
Avoid Musculoskeletal Disorders (MSDs) Using Data
The impetus for the creation of Motion Explorer was found during a closer look at data from a manufacturing customer. MākuSafe deployed at four sites within the same company. These sites were all performing the same work roles, laid out similarly, using the same machines at similar workstations, etc. The data, manually pulled from MākuSmart, showed two roles at one facility were working 750% harder in doing their jobs than the same roles being performed at three other sites. This raised a need for further study about how people are working, and what’s most efficient. These workers were experiencing such a higher degree of impact, and inevitably a larger toll on their bodies, when compared to other workers doing the same tasks. This is what leads to musculoskeletal disorders (MSD’s), and cumulative trauma over time, including sprains, strains and exertion incidents, which are expensive and a significant focus for many industries, but especially in materials handling jobs.
Motion Explorer empowers teams to gain these insights now in a few clicks. For ergonomists, this is a wealth of data not easily accessible before. For front line safety managers, it makes it easy to examine and uncover potential issues in a simple way, even in small to medium sized company where they are the entire safety team.
About MākuSafe
MākuSafe is an award-winning safety data and analytics company, proven to reduce the frequency and severity of industrial workplace accidents. Our mission is to improve worker health, safety, and productivity while reducing worker compensation claims and mitigating workplace hazards and risk exposures. MākuSafe’s patented wearable technology gathers real-time leading indicators of environmental conditions, potentially hazardous motion data, near-miss voice memos from workers, and the location of these occurrences within a facility or site. Our cloud platform, MākuSmart, takes in data from our wearable tech and other Industry 4.0 IIoT systems and equipment, then uses machine learning and AI to identify high-risk trends in the facility, aid process efficiencies, and provides automation integration potential. MākuSmart makes hazard intelligence immediately actionable, proactively targets remediation resources to specific conditions and occurrences, and streamlines compliance reporting as well as offering contact tracing features. Learn more at https://makusafe.com
