4 RESULTS
Using the expert system constructed during this thesis, a survey was conducted; 100
employees were asked to run the expert system and results were recorded.
Information about these employees is provided in appendix 3. Number of WRMSD
hazards was written for every employee. Then these results were processed and
different factors including gender, age and job position were investigated to see
whether they have a significant effect on WRMSD hazards. The important point is
that because of limited number of data, full factorial test could not be done, so we
just assumed there is no interaction between various factors and used one way
ANOVA to test the significance of existing factors.
One of the important points observed in this study was the fact that each employee
was experiencing 7.66 WRMSD hazards in average, this average did not change so
much for different treatments of our experiment except job position factor. For
example the average number of WRMSD hazards for female participants is equal to
7.7 and this value for male ones is equal to 7.65. The equality of these means was
tested with ANOVA and no significant difference was proved. These hazards can
lead to musculoskeletal disorders. This indicates that in spite of many efforts
performed in this area, still the ergonomic knowledge is not available for everyone or
it is just being ignored not knowing the consequences. Experts systems like the one
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we have developed can eliminate this problem by informing people about these
hazards and reminding them from time to time.