  Work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WMSDs) remain one of the major
occupational safety and health problems in the European Union nowadays. Thus,
continuous tracking of workers' exposure to the factors that may contribute to
their development is paramount. This paper introduces an online approach to
monitor kinematic and dynamic quantities on the workers, providing on the spot
an estimate of the physical load required in their daily jobs. A set of
ergonomic indexes is defined to account for multiple potential contributors to
WMSDs, also giving importance to the subject-specific requirements of the
workers. To evaluate the proposed framework, a thorough experimental analysis
was conducted on twelve human subjects considering tasks that represent typical
working activities in the manufacturing sector. For each task, the ergonomic
indexes that better explain the underlying physical load were identified,
following a statistical analysis, and supported by the outcome of a surface
electromyography (sEMG) analysis. A comparison was also made with a
well-recognised and standard tool to evaluate human ergonomics in the
workplace, to highlight the benefits introduced by the proposed framework.
Results demonstrate the high potential of the proposed framework in identifying
the physical risk factors, and therefore to adopt preventive measures. Another
equally important contribution of this study is the creation of a comprehensive
database on human kinodynamic measurements, which hosts multiple sensory data
of healthy subjects performing typical industrial tasks.
