Dr Stephen Bao
Stephen Bao is a certified professional ergonomist (CPE in USA and CCPE in Canada), senior ergonomist at the SHARP Program of Washington State Department of Labor and Industries. He is also an affiliated professor at the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health of University of Washington.
As a senior research ergonomist, he has performed numerous projects primarily in real workplaces to study relationships between workplace factors and musculoskeletal disorders, develop job assessment tools, and evaluate workplace ergonomics interventions.
With an engineering background, Stephen promotes solutions that can be integrated into industrial processes and machine/product designs to enhance productivity and improve work efficiency. He has done many ergonomics consultations with a wide range of industries. As a seasoned instructor, Stephen has taught many different targeted audiences including ergonomists, health and safety specialists, engineers, production workers, and university students. Stephen serves as an editor for Ergonomics and a senior editor for Ergonomics in Design.
Tuesday - All Times are PST July 23rd
Janitors’ Workload Calculator
This presentation presents the development of a Workload Calculator specific to the commercial office building janitorial service industry. This is developed due to the increased need for addressing the high workload issues and increased work-related injury claims in the industry. Actual field data were collected to quantify various workload measures and the risks are evaluated with widely used ergonomics job evaluation methods. These workload measures include work pace (based on ISSA standard times), overall workload (steps walked and energy expenditure demands, hand/wrist, shoulder and low back biomechanical exposures). This developed workload calculator can provide industrial practitioners with a tool to estimate the workload of planned or existing jobs. It can also help EHS, safety and ergonomics practitioners to identify issues and develop focused interventions. It can also provide cleaning equipment manufacturers and cleaning method developers means to identify issues in the current system and develop new equipment and methods for improvement.