An Evaluation of Posture Recognition Based on Intelligent Rapid Entire Body Assessment System for Determining Musculoskeletal Disorders

Determining the potential risks of musculoskeletal disorders through working postures in a workplace is expensive and time-consuming. A novel intelligent rapid entire body assessment (REBA) system based on convolutional pose machines (CPM), entitled the Quick Capture system, was applied to determine the risk levels. The aim of the study was to validate the feasibility and reliability of the CPM-based REBA system through a simulation experiment. The reliability was calculated from the differences of motion angles between the CPM-based REBA and a motion capture system. Results show the data collected by the Quick Capture system were consistent with those of the motion capture system; the average of root mean squared error (RMSE) was 4.77 and the average of Spearman’s rho (ρ) correlation coefficient in the different 12 postures was 0.915. For feasibility evaluation, the linear weighted Cohen’s kappa between the REBA score obtained by the Quick Capture system and those from the three experts were used. The result shows good agreement, with an average proportion agreement index (P0) of 0.952 and kappa of 0.738. The Quick Capture system does not only accurately analyze working posture, but also accurately determines risk level of musculoskeletal disorders. This study suggested that the Quick Capture system could be applied for a rapid and real-time on-site assessment.