Occupational and Environmental Medicine South (AMM Syd) investigates and analyses suspected health and safety, as well as environmental health, issues and conducts research on the subject. They work in the Southern Healthcare Region, which consists of Region Blekinge, the southern part of Region Halland, Region Kronoberg and Region Skåne. The Division of Occupational and Environmental Medicine is located at the Department of Laboratory Medicine, which is part of the Faculty of Medicine at Lund University. The knowledge from their research is used to identify health risks in the working and surrounding environment and aims to eliminate these risks and prevent ill health.
“One of our main goals is to work preventively by, among other things, spreading these types of measurement methods to occupational health care, safety representatives, supervisors and others working with health and safety issues. In order for this to be possible, the technology needs to be more user-friendly, robust and cheaper.” Henrik Enquist, AMM Syd
In collaboration with AMM Syd, Wavr Tech is now evaluating the possibility of using the Zentnl platform to simplify and broaden the measurement options. At present, it is a complicated procedure to carry out measurements with the technology currently used. The aim is to change this.
“With Zentnl, we want to reliably measure how a person’s skeleton moves using sensors in clothing on the outside of the body. The goal of our technology is to measure ergonomic risk factors reliably.” Patrik Zayas, Wavr Tech AB
AMM Syd has for 25 years studied the relationship between movement patterns and injuries. Among other things, a number of action levels for angles and angular velocities have been developed for different joints in the body. The action levels indicate which angles and angular velocities are considered harmful. AMM Syd also has extensive knowledge of how measurements should be made to obtain good data. It is clear that AMM Syd answers many of Zentnl’s questions and is an important partner in the clinical validation of the technical platform.
“The equipment for measuring wrist movements is both fragile, complicated to use and very expensive. This means that it is difficult for us as researchers to collect larger amounts of data. In addition, other non-experts are discouraged from measuring. This is unfortunate, especially when the risks of hand-intensive work have been increasingly emphasized in the Swedish Work Environment Authority’s regulation on medical checks (AFS 2019:3). It has therefore become necessary to examine whether there is hand-intensive work and the best way to do so is with technical/objective measurement methods.” Henrik Enquist, AMM Syd
REFERENCE
Henrik Enquist, Research Engineer
henrik.enquist@med.lu.se
