Sharif Digital Repository

Obesity is a worldwide growing health challenge affecting ~30% of the world's population. Increased rate of disc degeneration and herniation, low back pain and surgery has been reported in obese individuals. Although obesity-related low back diseases have multifactorial etiology, presumably greater mechanical loads on the spine of heavier individuals during their daily activities may be considered as a risk factor. Likely larger trunk muscle sizes, disc sizes and thus passive stiffness in heavier individuals may however partly or fully offset the effect of their additional body weight on the spinal loads. In absence of in vivo approaches, the present study aims to construct subject-specific... 

Low Back Pain is one of the most problems in health domain which has a high treatment costs, also has high recurrence rates. Postural stability has been introduced as a health characteristic for musculoskeletal systems. Body stability is maintained with sensory feedback data such as Eyes, Vestibular and proprioception data which are sent to brain. Prior investigations have shown that proprioception data have many disorders in lumbar area of Low Back Pain patient and this data are not sent to brain encounters so many problems for muscle activation and stability of body. Researches have been indicated that Low Back Pain patients rely on Ankle proprioception more than healthy people and less... 

Low back disorders (LBD) is one of the most musculo-skeletal disorders in industrial environments in which it can impose to the society.Therefore, it is very important to reaserch the causes of LBDs, prevention methods and evaluation risk factor in lifting tasks in order to avoid the prevalence of LBDs in society. There is no doubt heavy lifting has a significant role in emerging of LBDs. Hence, many safety risk assessment tools have been made by researchers.Using assessment tools, we need to know the input parameters corrospending to the assessment tools. Input parameters in assessment tools have been measured in a way of traditional method or by expensive equipment in laboratories. On... 

Low back pain is one of the most prevalent musculoskeletal injuries in occupational activities. In order to reduce or prevent it, it is necessary to estimate the mechanical loads of body joints. Direct measurement of spinal loads is invasive and costly. Therefore, musculoskeletal modeling is a convenient tool in estimation of joints and muscles loads that often uses kinematics information as input.Marker-based motion capture systems are one of the most common ways for the estimation of body kinematics. Unfortunately, they are time consuming and expensive. Thus being marker-free and low-cost, Microsoft Kinect is a suitable alternative. Recent studies often have investigated accuracy of... 

According to epidemiological studies, low back pain is the most prevalent musculoskeletal disease thus indicating the important role of biomechanical engineers to manage risk of injury. Different quantitative (i.e., biomechanical models) and qualitative (empirical) assessment tools are used to evaluate risk of musculoskeletal injuries. The present study uses various quantitative and qualitative risk assessment tools to investigate the risk of injury among workers in Iran Khodro Automaker company (IKCO) assembly hall No. 3 (Pars Peugeot car assembly). Moreover, different engineering and administrative interventions are suggested to manage risk of musculoskeletal injuries when needed. The...