1. Scope

Keywords

Rationale

Safety professionals use ergonomic assessment tools to identify and mitigate work-related musculoskeletal injury risks. Exoskeletons are wearable devices that complement traditional ergonomic controls by reducing musculoskeletal forces, a key risk factor for overexertion injuries in the workplace. There are currently no industry standards for assessing changes in ergonomic risk when a worker wears a back exoskeleton (also commonly referred to a back-assist exoskeleton, back-support-exoskeleton, or lift-assist exoskeleton). This test method specifies a test setup, analysis procedure, and recording to standardize the ergonomic assessment of workers wearing back exoskeletons to perform lifting, lowering, and bending tasks, for instance, tasks common in manual material handling work.