Prevalence of Musculoskeletal Disorders and its Impact on Lost Production Days among Industrial Workers: A Data Analytics Approach

Abstract

Health and safety of workers in the industrial environment remained a concern, and providing a safe work culture is top priority of the management. Mining Industry being one of the high-stress workplace witness different occupational health and safety issues. In this work, we envisioned a healthy work environment for the mining workforce and carried out detailed data analytics on accident, illness and injury dataset covering a total of 13 years of history from 2005-2017. Our results show that Work-related musculoskeletal disorder (WMSD) remained the most frequent health issues which further caused an average of 51 lost workdays and a maximum of 900 lost production days. Furthermore, individual analysis on the miners body part affected due to WMSDs shows that shoulder is most suffered followed by knee with an average of 77 and 57 lost workdays respectively, whereas back remained the most suffering body part in the entire dataset leading to an average of 48 lost workdays. In addition, underground mine operations witness more WMSDs in total than surface mines and mill or preparation plants. The findings reported will be useful to find out the factors leading to WMSDs at mining workplace and adopt preventive measures and introducing new alternative technologies considering automation at workplace.