Formulation of Mathematical Model to Investigate Magnitude of Musculoskeletal Pains Among Cotton Spinning Operators

Abstract

Hand-driven cotton spinning on traditional Charkha is the major small-scale entrepreneurship observed in Indian rural sector. The majority of women workers in these industries perform cotton spinning task adopting an uncomfortable posture. A cross-sectional study was conducted at two sites in central India region where 40 women operators were ergonomically evaluated to assess the effect of bad postures. A Dutch Musculoskeletal Questionnaire (DMQ ) was used. It was observed that 50% operators were suffering from musculoskeletal pains in different body regions. Twisting, bending, and over-reaching were the resultant of poorly designed workstations. It is revealed that mathematical model must be developed to find micro influences of various independent parameters over dependent parameters like neck, upper back, shoulder, lower back, elbow, wrist, knee, hip, and ankle/feet. An exponential model is developed based on response data from DMQ and also validated using ANN simulation. For cotton spinning occupation, duration of occupation has a greater impact over MSDs in Hip region (5.13%) compared to MSDs in other body regions. Health status, in general, is found to be influential on neck (15.75%), hip (16.04%), wrist/hand (12.47%), and ankles/feet (12.35). It has significant influence over the development of MSDs in elbow (24.85%), neck (15.17%), and upper back (13.71%).