Feasibility Study for the Physical Load Evaluation of Construction Machine Ingress and Maintenance

Construction machine ingress and maintenance is burdensome. Evaluating the operator’s physical load is thus important according to individual differences of the operators and machines. This paper presents a feasibility study for the physical load evaluation of two real-life operators of two excavator machines by motion measurement experiment in actual construction fields. Wearable inertial measurement units are used to capture the full-body posture of the operator. Insole foot pressure sensors and a strain gauge on the machine are used for measuring the contact forces. Physical load indices such as joint torques, the Ovako working posture analyzing system (OWAS), and the base-of-support (BoS) are calculated by kinematic and dynamic analysis of the digital human (DH). Applicability and effectiveness of evaluating physical load based on measurement in actual construction fields were discussed. Our results indicated that the joint torque evaluation is applicable to almost cases, however, the BoS and the OWAS are effective for a part of works.