Previous Webinars

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Link to the information on the event page

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Green Ergonomics: A global

Addressing Ladder Safety and Supporting Injury Prevention

Ergonomics Standards: Usefulness, Opportunities and Resources

Reducing Risk of MSI in BC Emergency Health Services Parame

Applications of the ONET & DOT 

RCRA Recommended Cumulative Recovery Allowance

To reduce the likelihood of work-related musculoskeletal overexertion injuries, a common approach in ergonomics involves the evaluation of task demands with respect to the physical capacity of the population. Due to the complexity of the workplace, and the myriad of possible task conditions, ergonomists and industrial engineers have relied on sophisticated digital human models (DHMs) to analyze the feasibility of tasks on a number of fronts, including: analyses of hand clearance, reach, line-of-sight, spine compression/shear and strength capabilities. Aside from the ability to model complex postures and task characteristics, DHMs allow for proactive ergonomics assessments, where workplaces and tasks can be assessed virtually before they ever exist in reality. This proactive ergonomics approach can result in substantial cost savings to industry and has the potential to drastically reduce workplace injury.

Regular interaction with clients is a consistent part of an Ergonomist’s day-to-day practice. In providing professional services and advice, you can be held liable for your actions. — Alex Ostola

With the right insurance and risk management tools in place professionals can manage their exposure effectively - we will cover the basics of insurance for individual professionals and businesses.

Everyday we interact with technology so frequently that we often form what resembles an interpersonal relationship with our devices and aids. To optimize human-system performance, we need to understand how the relationship to technology develops and technology designers need to consider the human's cognitive capabilities and limitations. This talk will cover human-technology interaction research in a broad range of contexts including the golf course, the battlefield and in neuro-rehabilitation.

Building on the presentation given at the 2016 ACE Atlantic Conference / Meeting, this webinar will ask participants to consider what we mean by ‘Ergonomics in our Community’. Moving beyond the stated theme of the 2016 Conference, the presentation, and now this webinar will speak to our vision of ergonomics and ergonomists and ask if and how we bring our knowledge, skills, and view point(s) to work in and for the betterment of the larger communities within which we live and work.

A look into how the use of new technology has impacted the workplace, our homes and how we learn. With the increased use of laptops, tablets and cellphones there has been rise in musculoskeletal disorders. This presentation looks into how technology has changed over the last several decades; the musculoskeletal disorders associated with the use of these new products and what you can do in order to decrease your risk of developing MSDs associated with the use of new technology.

We have all had moments where we have struggled to stay awake. Maybe you started watching that movie only to wake up during the credits? Perhaps you snuck in a nap at work? You may have even nodded off during the drive home, placing yourself and others at significant safety risk. Researchers, safety specialists and some companies are beginning to recognize that workplace fatigue is another form of impairment, much like distracted driving or drunk driving, which requires risk mitigation.

This webinar will provide individual strategies workers can take to maximize their own energy and get more sleep. The session will also discuss some of the control mechanisms and elements of a Fatigue Risk Management System that companies can introduce to maximize safety and performance while minimizing the effects of fatigue.

There is a reception center for the vast majority of companies: healthcare establishments, administrative offices, service companies, etc. There are many tasks (switchboard, recording and monitoring of visitors, receipt and dispatch of documents, administration, etc.) and multiple pieces of equipment (telephone console, computer equipment, fax, scanner, etc.).

Working at a reception desk sometimes causes postures and constraining motions that can contribute to the development of musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs). Reconciling communication with visitors, computer work and other tasks adds to the challenges, not to mention the challenges inherent in providing security, as well as the need for confidentiality that sometimes arises. In short, these work situations are relatively complex!

This workshop offers criteria for design of a safe and functional reception. Through discussions and exchanges, we will identify design benchmarks and ideas for defining concepts for different types of needs.

Creating, implementing and sustaining a manual materials handling (MMH) program brings with it tremendous opportunities and challenges. What are the legal requirements? Who wants the program? Who needs the program? What content needs to be in the program? How does the program get communicated? How is the program evaluated? How is the program going to be kept current and relevant?

Ce webinaire vous aidera à concevoir un poste d’accueil sécuritaire et fonctionnel ou à corriger les déficiences d’un poste existant. Vous y trouverez des repères à la conception et des pistes de réflexion pour définir le concept correspondant le mieux à vos besoins. Un guide complet sur l’aménagement des postes d’accueil sera également disponible en version téléchargeable.

In 2016 the ACGIH published a new TLV®: Upper Limb Localized Fatigue. The purpose of the TLV is to provide employers and health and safety professionals guidance for preventing upper extremity musculoskeletal fatigue among workers who perform cyclical work for 2 or more hours per day. The TLV® is based combinations of hand force and exertion time that have been found to be acceptable for repetitive work. Exposure limits to job risk factors are presented that will allow most healthy workers to maintain their work capacity and normal performance for the duration of the workday without experiencing excessive persistent fatigue. Excessive fatigue many be experienced as pain, decreased strength, localized discomfort, tremor or other symptoms or signs of reduced motor control. This webinar will present an introduction to localized fatigue, the scientific basis for the TLV, methods of determining hand force levels and patterns, and example from the workplace of the application of the TLV®. At the conclusion of the presentation there will be time for questions and comments.

In this webinar, I will review traditional ergonomic tools, including how physical risk factors are summed to predict injury risk in each assessment method. I will explore how these tools relate to mechanisms of injury, with the goal of providing guidance for determining when (and when not) to use each assessment method. I will then introduce alternative ergonomic assessment techniques, which relate more closely to injury development. I will further highlight the use of these novel methods in an ongoing ergonomics research project inside the pork industry in Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

The Health Quality Council of Alberta recently released a framework which is intended to be a guiding document to support the planning and evaluation of healthcare environment mock-ups from which an improved design process can result. It was developed in collaboration with many local and international experts and stakeholders. Specifically, it outlines a systematic way to collect and analyze data from full scale mock-ups through the use of simulation, where individuals enact processes and procedures that will be performed in the space. This presentation will provide an overview of the evaluation methodology. Identifying and addressing design issues early in the design process will likely yield financial returns, improved patient safety,and could prevent decades of inconveniences.

 Assessment of posture, manual materials handling and vibration are critical to modern ergonomics practice. Whether we want to check for compliance with an exposure limit, or test for changes befor

Over the past year we have been working with the Chartered Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors (CIEHF) and the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) to develop an international webinar series and we are working with the Quebec Region to partner with SELF to provide international French webinars. These webinars are available to members only.

We are excited to announce that the CIEHF will host the first one.

In this presentation, Safety I; the traditional view of safety and Safety II (Resilience) - the new view will be explored and contrasted. The presentation will juxtapose definitions of safety, safety management principles, accident causation concepts, and notions on error and performance variability from each perspective. Advantages and disadvantages of each perspective emerge highlighting a path forward for combining the two ways of thinking. The four basic abilities of a resilient organization are described and practical suggestions are given for developing a Safety II approach and advancing workplace safety.

Dans le monde du travail, la majorité de personnes a recours aux ordinateurs pour réaliser leurs tâches. Une grande partie de cette population exerce au sein de milieux bureautiques ayant à leur disposition des surfaces de travail, des chaises (voir fauteuils), claviers et dispositifs de pointage. Ces outils de travail peuvent être vendus comme étant « ergonomiques » mais ceci pose un problème, car ils peuvent être qualifiés de tel sans justification. Dans ce webinaire nous allons explorer des outils disponibles pour améliorer l'ergonomie de travail en milieu bureautique. Pour illustrer et donner plus de profondeur à la situation, on présentera des résultats des recherches avec différents styles de claviers, dispositifs de pointage (souris +), surfaces de travail et sièges afin d'en ressortir l'adaptation du travail à l'opérateur qui l'effectue. En faisant un état des connaissances actuelles sur l’ergonomie, quelques parts d’ombre du grand public sont identifiables. Il est de notre rôle, en tant qu’ergonomes, de veiller à la bonne présentation des options et à la poursuite de nouveaux équipements qui vont au-delà du marketing et qui visent à réduire, et même dans un but ultime, de résoudre, les risques liés au milieu bureautique.

This presentation will introduce safety theories – their origin, their authors, their seminal works and their salient points. These will be illustrated with quotations from a qualitative study, demonstrating that current ideas in frontline workers span the history of safety theories. Two theories will be compared and contrasted in looking at a specific case of a death in obstetrics, revealing that an investigation is far from objective and neutral, but depends on the biases of the investigator.

This webinar will provide an overview of the 2012 CFAS methodology, results and visualization and analysis tools that are being developed along with examples of how the data is benefiting a variety of projects, from acquisition to biomechanical modeling. A demonstration of a novel whole body 3D shape analysis tool as well as future work in encumbered anthropometry and digital human modeling will also be presented.

The Health Quality Council of Alberta is developing a publically available framework and toolkit to support the use of human factors and patient simulation to evaluate mock-ups as part of the design process for new or renovated built environments. The framework and toolkit, developed in collaboration with various experts and stakeholders, is expected to provide guidance, increase awareness, and help spread utilization of this approach. The ultimate goal is to enhance the design of healthcare environments for safe and efficient patient and family centered care.

Ergonomists are well aware of the various workplace and work process hazards that contribute to the development of UEMSDs; however, there is little consensus in the literature on effective ways to reduce or eliminate hazards. The Institute for Work & Health (IWH) has conducted a number of reviews to identify effective approaches for preventing and managing UEMSDs. The objective of this project is to update the review of workplace-based UEMSD prevention with a view to updating the key messages.

Over the past few years, IWH has collaborated with a number of parties to create an evidence-based, standard-compliant eLearning on Office Ergonomics. This presentation will provide attendees with a brief history of the program’s development, it’s effectiveness in two separate field trials, and how it can be currently accessed to support your needs as a practicing ergonomist. The effectiveness of alternative training methods will also be discussed.

This webinar will focus on the intersection between unmanned aerial systems and automation. First, there will be an overview of the different types and sizes of unmanned aerial systems, how the systems are classified, and how each system presents different human factors challenges in regard to automation. Training, best practices, common reasons for mission abend, and research challenges will be discussed.. The talk will be a broad overview of the field with a focus on small unmanned systems.

We know surprisingly little about something we do all the time. Like takeoffs and landings in aviation, Handover in healthcare is a time of great risk, this is where success and failure are often determined. Until recently, handover communication was not explicitly taught to healthcare providers ...we are changing that rapidly. By studying work as done (vs. work as imagined) we have designed a simple method which honours the complexity of care and resilience of clinicians, yet simplifies that which can be simplified. Join Wrae to learn about how we are applying resilience engineering principles to healthcare handovers.

The Online webinar will touch on issues surrounding the use of biomechanics in a forensic (legal) setting. Specifically, I hope to relay my experience with respect to the types of investigations where biomechanics can provide unique and beneficial insight into mechanisms of injury and the effectiveness of this discipline in injury claims.

The CSA Z412 Office Ergonomics Guideline is the only office ergonomics standard which the CSA currently provides, and is one of the only comprehensive office ergonomics guidelines that includes a macro ergonomics perspective.

This webinar will provide a general understanding of the contents in the current CSA Z412 Office Ergonomics Guideline, how it is used, and the plans for its future.

Participatory Ergonomics (PE) has evolved to become a common method of workplace assessment and investigation. Yet, this intervention approach if often associated with difficulties engaging key stakeholders, accessing proper training resources, ensuring proper knowledge translation, capacity building and sustainability. However, many of the criticisms and barriers of participatory ergonomics are common in other fields of participatory research. In this presentation we will explore a recent project that identified some of the parallels between participatory ergonomics and participatory research in public health, and identify lessons that we can draw upon to better support participatory ergonomics projects.

This webinar will introduce participants to the various ergonomic tools available to evaluate upper extremity demands, with a special emphasis on repetitive and prolonged tasks. Jim will discuss the scientific literature available to guide ergonomic decisions. He will also present an equation he has recently developed and published, based on available psychophysical literature, that allows for a wide variety of available maximum strength data to be corrected based on a task’s duty cycle. This equation allows for estimates to be made of maximum acceptable efforts as a percentage of maximum strength, so that acceptable upper extremity forces and torques can be established.

A new metric system and set of ergonomics criteria was launched across 120 North American plants in 2007. A custom built web database was developed to provide a platform for each plant to manage their site specific ergonomics program as well as for reporting metrics. The 5 measured categories were: 1) Support Infrastructure, 2) Analysis and Prioritization, 3) Implementation and Risk Reduction, 4) Engineering Design and 5) Metrics and Communication. Overall, the new structure ensured a more systematic and robust method was used for identifying and reducing ergonomic risk in all plants. The central database increased the ease of sharing information by providing a central location for all plants to obtain ergonomic tools/templates, understand corporate requirements, and receive timely feedback from the corporate ergonomists.