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Remote operation of continuous mining machines has enhanced the health and safety of underground miners in many respects; however, numerous fatal and non-fatal continuous miner struck-by accidents have occurred. In an effort to prevent these injuries, NIOSH researchers at Pittsburgh Research Laboratory studied the workplace relationships between continuous miner operators and various tramming tasks of the equipment using motion capture data, operator response times, and field of view data to evaluate the factors influencing operator-machine struck-by events (contact with a solid object) in a virtual mine environment. It is not feasible (nor ethical) to use human subjects to directly evaluate factors that precipitate such injuries. However, use of motion analysis data and digital human models can facilitate analysis of struck-by accident risk by allowing investigators to manipulate factors that influence injury.

NIOSH researchers conducted a study to evaluate the severity of muscle recruitment and spine loads resulting from performance of the roof bolting cycle in different work postures and mine seam heights. Ten male and two female subjects performed three repetitions of a mine roof bolting in each of seven posture/seam height combinations, while researchers obtained motion data of their actions using a motion capturing system. A database containing forces on L4/L5 spinal joint and on back muscles was generated by processing the captured motions from each subject using UGS PLM Solution Jack software’s task analysis toolkit – lower back analysis. An analysis of variance was performed using the maximum values for spinal forces and moments and estimated muscle forces for ten trunk muscles in the resulting database.

This paper presents the results of a study using computer human modeling to examine machine appendage speed. The objective was to determine the impact of roof bolter machine appendage speed on the likelihood of the operator coming in contact with. A contact means two or more objects intersecting or touching each other, e.g., appendage makes contact with the operator’s hand, arm, head or leg. Incident investigation reports do not usually contain enough information to aid in studying this problem and laboratory experiments with human subjects are also not feasible because of safety and ethical issues. As an alternative, researchers developed a computer model approach as the primary means to gather data. By simulating an operator’s random behavior and machine’s appendage velocity, researchers can study potential hazards of tasks where it is not possible to perform experiments with human subjects.